IPTV: The Venice Project
The revolution will not be televised? The revolution is television. IP television. IPTV. There is nothing much on the website of The Venice Project yet except sign-up links, but Om Malik has the scoop: the co-founders of both Kazaa (file sharing) and Skype have a new project in the works to marry television and the Internet. Uh. that’s called IPTV, lads. What are they doing different that other IPTV services/ sites are not already doing? Something they’re calling a platform, which includes content owners, advertisers, and viewers. This includes an “ad-based system” similar to television.
Haven’t they heard that onliners don’t have the attention span for ads? This better be one sophisticated system. Well, it seems to be; it’s a streaming P2P platform for TV. If you know Kazaa, you know it’s based on P2P technology. Kazaa of course ended up costing them US$100M to settle copyright-infringement lawsuits for the content that users passed around on their network. This time, though, everyone will benefit.
They have a beta test you can sign up for on the site, and they say their software is near television quality. Should be interesting. I’ve already signed up. Then again, considering that you can already see Japanese TV over Skype, I’m wondering if The Venice Project is essentially a souped of version of this sort of functionality, with a more suitable soft interface. Can’t wait to see this.
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October 16th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
[...] You can already watch TV over Skype; there’s a Japanese web site that broadcasts three minutes at a time for six channels of TV. The cofounders of Skype are also working on their “Internet TV platform”, currently dubbed The Venice Project (TVP). But with SightSpeed ahead of the pack in high-quality video calling, and now the added exposure due to being part of the AMD LIVE! software suite, I’m beginning to wonder how much chance TVP has if they don’t release soon. [...]
December 25th, 2006 at 5:26 am
[...] A few days ago, an invite to beta test TVP (The Venice Project), finally arrived. TVP is the new brainchild of geniuses Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who created the P2P (peer-to-peer) Kazaa (file sharing) and Skype (VoIP client). Under the terms of the beta test agreement, I cannot divulge much. But let me tell you what I can. [...]