I don't think it would be that hard to have a computer program scrape a form, compare it to industry predictions and take a position in well under a second.
Public companies almost always release the headline numbers -- revenue, EBITDA, net income -- ahead of the bell, so your "compare to predictions" argument is mostly moot.
In terms of building something automated to examine the detailed line-items and automatically trade based on any analysis done, that would be incredibly hard in its own right, and practically impossible once you factor in scrubbing for one-time charges.