The Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom signed an accord with eBay when their company was acquired.
Under that accord, they can not use Skype peer-to-peer technology to launch another business in the telephony area. So that leaves video.
And once you’ve got entrepreneurship in your blood, you go out and do it again, right? That’s why they’ve launched the Venice Project, their latest company, focused on making Internet TV a reality for the masses.
Om Malik has a brief interview, and here are the important snippets:
Janus Friis:…What we have done is created a streaming P2P platform for television. This is a platform, which is good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers. Since there are no borders on the Internet, this is a global platform. Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that.
OM: When will you launch the service? What are the bandwidth requirements for The Venice Project? And how good of a quality will the streams have.
JF: Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. There is nothing complicated and simple. Our software is already in beta, and we are doing some bug squashing right now. You can sign-up and we are inviting more people to our beta program. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second.
There is more on Janus’ blog. Our observation of the historical record is that it is rare for an entrepreneur to go out and have two really big hits. We’ve seen them do two decent, or two really good hits, but not two extraordinary hits. So we shall see if they can pull this off.
We hear from a good source there are no venture backers behind this company (at least yet).
3 Comments
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Brian McConnell said:
It seems to be that there are a number of technical issues that will be difficult to overcome in a true P2P video system.
IP telephony works, occasionally, because the media stream has a small footprint relative to a typical connection (e.g. 40-80kbps versus several megabits downstream, several hundred K upstream).
To do P2P video you need a lot more upstream connectivity, to the point that a typical user, if they agree to share their connection, does not have enough upstream connectivity to relay more than one or two medium resolution video feeds.
It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off, but I think it will be difficult to get people to participate as much as skype.
My gut read, unless they are really doing something like YouTube that is centralized, is that they are a few years ahead of the curve and should retry when FTTH is commonplace.
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Ryan Daigle said:
Skype is not considered an “extraordinary” hit?
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Matt Marshall said:
Yes, Skype is an extraordinary hit. So was Kazaa, but not exactly financially. That’s my point. They’ve already done so well, that it’ll be remarkable if they pull off a second, extraordinary financial hit.
3 Trackbacks
3:45 am
Janus Friis: The Venice Project and Skype share the same core technology – 21talks said:
[...] UPDATE, October 16, 2006 — Venture Beat indirectly answered to our questions. “The Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom signed an accord with eBay when their company was acquired. Under that accord, they can not use Skype peer-to-peer technology to launch another business in the telephony area. So that leaves video.” So not combination possible. [...]
12:50 pm
VentureBeat » GridNetworks, new video streaming co., wants to steal Venice Project’s thunder – said:
[...] It aims to compete with the upcoming Venice Project, which is the company started by the Skype co-founders. Venice is supposed to launch in New York at the Television conference Thurs. or Friday. Venice Project is a peer-to-peer technology (hosted on a network of individual computers) for television viewing as simply as they did peer-to-peer for phones. [...]
10:25 pm
GridNetworks « Technically Speaking said:
[...] You can read the GridNetwork statement on their technology. Venice project was covered more indepth about 2 weeks back right here. [...]