Its name sounds like a USC film school assignment, but don’t be fooled—The Venice Project is a new media company you will be hearing a lot about in the near future. Created by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of file-sharing network Kazaa (sold to Sharman Networks) and Internet telephony company Skype (which was sold to Ebay for $2.6 billion), The Venice Project aims to offer a complete solution to television over the Internet, improving on the piecemeal pirated offerings of YouTube and the scant content of the networks themselves.Its name sounds like a USC film school assignment, but don’t be fooled—The Venice Project is a new media company you will be hearing a lot about in the near future. Created by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of file-sharing network Kazaa (sold to Sharman Networks) and Internet telephony company Skype (which was sold to Ebay for $2.6 billion), The Venice Project aims to offer a complete solution to television over the Internet, improving on the piecemeal pirated offerings of YouTube and the scant content of the networks themselves.
Friis and Zennstrom have impeccable tech credentials and have the luxury of being able to leverage the technology knowledge that they developed with Skype and Kazaa. This is possible thanks to their agreement with Ebay, which stated that they were not permitted to launch another business in the telephony area. Of the other options left to them, Friis and Zennstrom jumped into video.
Thanks to the deep pockets of its founders, The Venice Project has been able to develop in relative privacy for the past ten months (VentureBeat reports that there is no venture capital behind The Venice Project). While rumors about a killer Internet video application have occasionally surfaced, the overall company has received very little publicity. That has changed over the past few weeks as the company prepares for launch.
So what is The Venice Project and what makes it so revolutionary? Executive Sylvain Wallez described it on his website this way: “It’s TV as it always should have been, on-demand, instantly (no download), with plenty of community features that make TV an enjoyable experience. With advertising of course, but less than on regular TV, and hopefully interesting because targeted… The little blurry movies of video websites will definitely and forever look ugly compared to this. But actually The Venice project should not be compared to them: this is TV, provides full-screen quality content. From professional providers, and soon from users, always with a focus on quality.”
The Venice Project website itself describes the company this way: “We’re fixing TV; removing artificial limits such as the number of channels that your cable or the airwaves can carry and then bringing it into the internet age; adding community features, interactivity, etc.”
True on-demand Internet television of excellent quality and no download times, with interactive and community features, is revolutionary. But how can The Venice Project succeed where others have stumbled? Two areas:
Technology: The peer-to-peer IP expertise that its founders have from both Skype and Kazaa is fueling The Venice Project. Running Flash video off a server is easily accomplished today, but (as Wallez mentioned above) the quality is poor and you often have to wait through a buffered connection, especially with long videos. The Venice Projects engineers promise to have removed all of those issues.
Content distribution: The Venice Project does intend on distributing consumer-generated video (albeit only “quality” video), but the real draw to the company is the potential for true television over the Internet. Executives have been meeting with every studio and network head with the goal of creating, for lack of a better term, the Internet equivalent of a cable company. Businessweek used that same analogy in its recent report on the company: “The idea is to become a dominant TV distribution company for the Internet era, just as companies such as Comcast have dominated TV distribution in the cable era.”
That this is a realistic goal has been made clear over the past year, as television networks have been much more open to using the Internet to release content than the movie and music industries. Since the advent of cable, television networks have always had to learn to deal with external distribution companies and content aggregators. That this is in some ways just a different version of that business model works in The Venice Project’s favor.
Several companies are making waves in the Internet television distribution space, from Brightcove to Veoh, but only one other company appears to have such a clear vision of creating a true television experience via the Internet as The Venice Project. That company is GridNetworks, and it is aiming for a similar “Internet television” goal as The Venice Project, only with a different technology (a mixture of peer-to-peer and a central content delivery network), and a different content model (The Venice Project appears to offer more consumer control).
One compelling aspect that separates The Venice Project from GridNetworks and others is that quite a bit of its technology is built on open source software. This allows enthusiasts and users to create an almost limitless number of plug-ins and widgets to customize and extend the viewer experience. As stated on The Venice Project website: “Since we’re based on some widely distributed Open Source software we do expect people to quickly be able to leverage it and tune it to their own wild ideas, hobbies and interests.”
TiVo recently saw the tremendous impact that opening up its software to the open source community can do for a company when they released their developer software on the open source site Sourceforge. The result was a wave of applications and features that users could use to control their TiVo from their PC, creating an amazing surge in TiVo functionality that the company couldn’t have hoped to replicate with its in-house developers.
While The Venice Project is still in the beta stage, its combination of technology, open source software, and an industry open to leveraging Internet content, makes it look like one of the companies to watch for 2007.
