Is it possible to skip an LTS upgrade?

I decided to drop Mark Shuttleworth a comment on his blog.

My Question:

Mark – its not clear what the LTS upgrade strategy is beyond 12.04.

i.e. – could a 12.04 business jump to 16.04 directly – i.e. plan to upgrade in 4 years time?

and Mark's response:

We support LTS-to-LTS upgrades, so yes, you could stay on 12.04 LTS, then move to 16.04 LTS (in our current testing plan we would test the migration from 12.04 to 14.04 and then to 16.04, not directly).

Thus, any business on 12.04 LTS staying for 4 to 5 years, their upgrade plan would be first 14.04 LTS and staying with that for the 3-4 years that LTS gives, or to plan a double upgrade - 14.04 and then 16.04.

Server LTS releases have always had five year support windows, and it has not previously been supported to skip an LTS on the server.

Similarly, standard releases are supported for 18 months. This means that when a new version comes out, two versions back is still supported. But skipping a release is not supported.

Therefore it seems very unlikely that it will be possible to skip an LTS upgrade. However, Canonical have surprised us before (e.g. extending Desktop LTS support to five years), so they might again!