The rumours of Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark next project have been whirling around for about six months since sold Skype to eBay for $2.6Bn, the two are focusing their talents on TV with The Venice Project.
To date, the pair and their team have had a lot of success in disrupting industries. They’ve had a pop at the music business with Kazaa, the telephone business via Skype and now the television business. Time for the TV world to take note.
This weekend, the Financial Times has picked up on the story, re-igniting the media interest.
The Venice Project (TVP) employed their first programmer on 1 January 2006, so have had nearly a year to get the software to the point where it’s ready to be noticed. The beta release came out on 12 December and since then they have a reported 6,000 on the beta program.
We suspect the FT piece was part of a carefully-managed media campaign, as TVP will need to start attracting the advertisers that will support the content being show for free to the users of TVP.
What does TVP do?
On their blog, the TVP team outline their desires/drivers for the project. The founding idea – TV isn’t good, so it needs fixing.
It’s not Skype TV as some publications have reported.
TVP is headquartered in Leiden in The Netherlands it also has other offices in Toulouse, France; London and New York. Its CEO is Fredrik de Wahl, and it looks like they’ve built up quite a few employees.
The FT are reporting it will carry “near high-definition” programmes, while TVP speak about TV-quality.
We’ve seen some screenshots of the service and, even despite its early beta-stage, it looks pretty slick. The video runs in full screen, with a high quality image being shown. Additional content and EPG features are laid on top, with the video still viewable underneath.
Content for the beta-trial is coming from some pretty big names in the media business including Warner Brothers.
The adverts that are shown on the service, allow it be free. We understand from one of the beta testers that the adverts are not too intrusive and pretty short.
It’s not just the P2P
On a simple level, TVP is software that enables the delivery of video content to individuals using P2P to ease the distribution, while radically reducing the price of getting it out there. Indeed most of the mainstream media are focusing their attention on TVP using P2P.
We think this misses the biggest change the TVP could bring about. Recommendation and tagging of content will make the content findable – one of the biggest headaches when the worlds content is available to a viewer.
Once programmes have been selected to watch, we understand that there will be tools to let people discuss the shows as they are going on – thus bringing a community around the TV shows. There are add on services that offer this, but its inclusion as an integral part of the system will make it second nature to contribute to.
It appears that TVP will avoid the need to apply DRM to the content as “the bits and bytes being collected on your computer are fragments of a stream,” as Fredrik de Wahl, the project’s chief executive told the FT. We can see that there is logic behind this, but doesn’t address the fact that, for the programme to be shown, they need to reside on the machine while they are being shown. In truth, all that needs to be achieved with the technology is to pursue the content owner to put their content on it.
The Venice Project is definitely one to watch. We hope to get on the beta program soon, to give you a more in-depth view and understanding of its impact.
Images courtesy of Choose Chris
With last week’s launch of it’s TV over the Internet service, a raft of integrated net-based services and a slew of new hardware devices, BT has relauched itself as a multi-media service provider instead of a plain old utility company. The BT Internet Radio shows another face of BT’s rebranding. It’s a slickly designed consumer electrical product aimed directly at the growing digital radio sector.
Choosing between stations is a bit of a hit and miss affair. If your tastes tend towards anything beyond the mainstream categorizations (rock, pop, dance, hip hop etc) you’ll struggle to find the music you want to hear. This, of course, isn’t BT’s fault. The device uses the Reciva Internet Portal to aggregate its stations. If you access the Reciva Website (
The device can access and playback MP3 or other audio files from a networked PC. An extremely useful feature and one that really capitalizes on the network power of the unit. It probably would have done the most to sell this device to me. In practice it was unable to connect to my PC so I had to leave the feature untested. Typically, macs are not supported and I was unable to access my sizable MP3 collection via either of the macs on the network. It’s not surprising that BT have chosen to adopt Windows technology for integration with computers but it is disappointing that they couldn’t have adopted an interoperable standard which would have supported any operating system.
Wow … things are really starting to gel across the Murdoch media businesses, as James Murdoch starts showing his hand. Perhaps this is the first real example of seeing James’ talent on with what we’ve been told was his passion – that for convergence.
A number of Sky One shows will be available over the service. Sounds great, until you imagine that 93% of the those using Sky By Broadband already own a Sky+ box – having the ability to see the shows when they want to anyway.
The pricing of PSone games to be played on the Sony PSP have been announced.
It was initially envisaged that Sony would give access to the Playstation Store through the PSP using its WiFi connection. We can see one advantage of not doing this – people wanting to use the service will need to buy a PS3!
Time Magazine has stepped up to the awards podium, opened the little brown envelope and named the video sharing Web site YouTube as its “Invention of the Year.”
Clearly in a mood for waxing lyrical, the Time’s Lev Grossman was ready to add his own insights: “YouTube had tapped into something that appears on no business plan – the lonely, pressurised, pent-up video subconscious of America.”
A new survey has revealed that UK consumers are way down with streaming and downloading audio-visual content into their living room, but they’re not so keen on paying for the stuff.
The report found that half of those questioned weren’t prepared to pay a single Goddamn bean extra for streamed/downloaded content, with a further 18% only willing to cough up £2 per month for content, and 22% only happy to pay between £2 and £5.
According to Olswang’s research, easily-distracted, multi-tasking consumers are paying less attention to watching programmes, with 46% of respondents busy emailing and 43% web surfing while watching television.
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube.
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane.
What we think so far
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon.
Pure Digital Technologies has announced a cheapo camcorder that can upload movies to video sharing Web sites like Google Video with a single click.
Allen Weiner, an analyst with market tracker Gartner, reckoned Pure Digital were on to a winner, describing the pint-size camcorder as “simple, but also revolutionary.”
UK Broadcaster Channel Five have launched their Five Download, Video on Demand (VoD), service with US series CSI. They’ve 