While the buzz over the last few years has been all around social networking and entertainment technologies, webcasting has been somewhat blandly gaining ground as a trusted and reliable productivity tool for large organizations with geographically dispersed audiences.

All of a sudden, webcasting is hot, and is melting the hearts of notoriously cold customers in the IT and Finance departments.

What's happened? It's simple: the economy has made saving money about the sexiest thing going.  And for many organizations, webcasting saves lots of it - whether it's replacing the cost of people having to fly to meetings and training sessions, or reducing satellite broadcast and other third-party service costs.

In January, an Interactive Media Strategies' report summed it up best: "In the fast-growing global economic environment that epitomized the first seven years of the decade, webcasting's message of frugality ran against the tides of market demand...Now, the tables have turned. As the global economy slips into recession, the potential audience of executives interested in webcasting's message of cost cutting is certain to expand dramatically in 2009.

"Business efficiency is fashionable, and the online video sector stands among the few emerging technology areas that can truly sell an implementation that quickly translates into cost savings and streamlined business practices," writes principal analyst Steve Vonder Haar.

While conferencing services will always have their usefulness - particularly for small, interactive group meetings - webcasting's efficiency for one-to-many communications is hard to beat.

And, for those companies that have the tech acumen and are willing to put in a little sweat equity, the ROI from deploying an on-premise webcasting system versus other communications and training methods is nearly immediate. Consider:

• You buy a webcasting system (one-time expense);
• You use your own network to stay in close touch with your organization - all the time - whether they are in the office, in the field, or at home;
• It costs you the same amount whether you talk to ten - or 10,000 - people, whether you do it once - or ten times - a day, and whether they are in the next building, or next continent.

With a value-proposition like that, webcasting could turn out to be America's new sweetheart technology (or maybe I'd better stop eating all those little candy hearts...).