23 October 2006

The Venice Project: 507 channels and somethin' on

After disrupting music distribution with file-sharing system Kazaa, and upsetting telecommunications with Voice-over-IP service Skype, TEDGLOBAL speaker Niklas Zennström and his accomplice Janus Friis have now set their sights on television. Their project is code-named "Venice". Little is known so far, but given their history, it's likely to be based on peer-to-peer distribution technology. Their austere homepage (where you can apply to become a beta tester) says they want to

combine the best things about television with the social power of the Internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

On his blog, Friis added recently a few more details:

It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!

Om Malik asked him a few additional questions, and Friis added that they will be using the same core technology on which Skype is built (which means that they're likely to use some of the users' CPU and bandwidth to make the system work). He added:

Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second. [The business model will be] ad-based, close to the television model. We will do revenue share with the content providers.

So, to summarize: streaming peer-to-peer television; free to the user (just download the client software); ad-supported (with ad targeting); revenue-shares with content providers; time-shifted; searchable; with "social TV" features (tagging, recommendations, etc); potentially infinite number of channels.

Assuming that they can get the technology to work, the key portion will be striking deals with content providers (Many of these have tested the waters recently with downloads on iTunes and others. So it won't be surprising if they jump on board). I haven't seen anything about user-generated content, but presumably that will be part of the model, too.

(Cross-posted on LunchOverIP)