The founders of Skype are close to launching a global broadband television service promising viewers, content owners and advertisers “the best of the internet with the best of TV”.
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, who sold their online telephony business to Ebay for $2.6bn last year, have invested part of the proceeds in developing the service, which has the codename The Venice Project. It will offer “near high-definition”, programmes supported by advertising, with tools for users to personalise their channels or discuss programmes with others.
Mr Friis said peer-to-peer technology used by the service, which exploits networks of personal computers rather than central servers, would make it possible to serve “tens of millions of users” while overcoming content owners’ security concerns. Programmes would not require digital rights management protection, said Fredrik de Wahl, the project’s chief executive, because “the bits and bytes being collected on your computer are fragments of a stream”.
View: Financial Times
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, who sold their online telephony business to Ebay for $2.6bn last year, have invested part of the proceeds in developing the service, which has the codename The Venice Project. It will offer “near high-definition”, programmes supported by advertising, with tools for users to personalise their channels or discuss programmes with others.
Mr Friis said peer-to-peer technology used by the service, which exploits networks of personal computers rather than central servers, would make it possible to serve “tens of millions of users” while overcoming content owners’ security concerns. Programmes would not require digital rights management protection, said Fredrik de Wahl, the project’s chief executive, because “the bits and bytes being collected on your computer are fragments of a stream”.
View: Financial Times
the more broadband users there are, the more internet tv broadcast services will come out.
i personally even prefer web tv, because there are lots of channels who broadcast for free all over the world; for the services that require a payment, you can make monthly or yearly payments at cheap prices and see all what you need to see, i.e. your favourite sport team games etc.
i'm in italy and the only way to see american or japanese tv (that's what i use to watch) internet is the only source.
of course, if you want to see on a web tv a local tv channel it's pretty impossible, but i actually dont care at all about local tv so i'm very satisfied with web tv. and i say this even if i have satellite tv with 500+ channels with live sports, movies at any time etc. web tv is great when you work on pc or simply surf the net, you leave it in a corner of the screen
so i'm very happy and looking forward to what skype will offer
200 channels for intel users
100 channel for amd users
AND Janus Friis!
Janus Friis is the developer of the software. Zennström is his partner handling marketing or something in that direction.
The result is really good.
The software is a mix between bittorrent and skype P2P system (including supernode i think, and everything made for live P2P) with somes great features (ability to talk in live with other viewers or friends in a built-in fullscreen transparent IM client for instance)
The quality is great (not really dvd-quality but still good, but it can evolve with higher bandwidth).
Everything is free (for now), with some little ads sometimes.
The content is professional (not youtube's 30 seconds videos).
The whole system is really great and use bandwidth efficiently.
However, i know a few big ISP not really happy with youtube daylimotion etc... traffic because they don't really pay for last miles bandwidth vs Video on Demand over ADSL-TV.
They will be really not happy with venice.
Yes of course, P2P takes already a lot of bandwidth, but not everyone use it and upload as fast as they can everytimes .
But here the popularity will be bigger, because it's legal and content is average-premium. Like skype.
Because yes, when you shut off the player, it don't stop relaying & uploading, like skype, but with a lot of bandwidth (you need 100 more bandwidth than a simple voice conversation).
So, yes it will be very popular, but all networks must upgrade if many people use it.
If it's anything remotely like Bittorrent that is...
Heh.. But yes, the application layer will likely be proprietary :-/
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