According to BusinessWeek, Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are
preparing to launch The Venice Project, a new start-up that "combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet." Venice--which is just a codename--has been in very limited testing since the summer, but the beta program will expand significantly in November, and Friis says it will be available to everyone by the end of the year. They're currently courting small and large media and TV companies to put their full-length content on the network, which will be accessed through a stand-alone app and work on P2P technology just like KaZaA and Skype. It will have built-in intellectual property controls and will stream media rather than download it, which BusinessWeek naively assumes "makes it much more difficult for users to make, distribute, or sell illegal copies of the content that they watch." At the uber-austere
Venice Project web site you can sign up for their mailing list which, presumably, will notify you when that expanded beta program starts.
Tags: janus friis, JanusFriis, media, niklas zennstrom, NiklasZennstrom, p2p, skype, startup, streaming, tv, venice, veniceproject, video
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Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsMr Wave TheoryDec 1st 2006 5:30AM
You can sign up for the beta by visiting the home page of the Venice Project. But before doing so, I would read the privacy policy. Kazaa was notorious for installing spyware on users' computers and it looks like The Venice Project will be making great efforts to do data collection on users. This is just the boilerplate from the web site on what the software will collect:
When you register to become a user of a TVP website, service or software, TVP collects certain information such as your first and last name, e-mail address, location, and birth date, as well as information about your use of TVP features and contributions of content.
http://mrwavetheory.blogspot.com/2006/10/skype-founders-launch-venice-project.html
Jordan RunningOct 6th 2006 8:48AM
Mr Wave Theory: KaZaA's indiscretions aside, it seems to me that Venice doesn't collect any information that Amazon.com or the iTunes Music Store doesn't.
PeterOct 8th 2006 12:35PM
Jordan, I agree. Mr. Wave you have posted the exact same comment on other news I have seen related to The Venice Project. (http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2006/10/the_venice_proj.html)
What's your beef with the VP