Janus Friis: The Venice Project and Skype share the same core technology

Janus Friis, one of the Skype Dynamic Duo, gave a very rare interview to GigaOM on their new venture, the Venice Project. The idea is to provide a peer-to-peer platform for television contents, as Skype does for IP telephony and Kazaa for files.

Om Malik: Does the Venice Project use the same core underlying technologies that were used in Kazaa and Skype? Janus Friis: Kazaa and Skype were based on a piece of technology called the “Global Index.” Skype basically built a communication layer on top of that. That technology has evolved since then, and the Venice Project, is built on that global index and we have developed a P2P video streaming layer on top of that core technology.

Two questions raise from this:

  1. Does it mean that sharing TV content could be already available through Skype and its video functionality? At an average quality and requiring a small to medium size bandwidth.
  2. Is their next move to combine the Skype’s, Kazaa’s and Venice Project’s networks to enhance the general quality of service of the service?

(The rest of the interview, 4 more questions)

UPDATE, October 16, 2006 — Venture Beat indirectly answered to our questions. “The Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom signed an accord with eBay when their company was acquired. Under that accord, they can not use Skype peer-to-peer technology to launch another business in the telephony area. So that leaves video.” So not combination possible.

Oct 5, 2006 | By Nuno

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1 comment

  • #0 Mr Wave Theory:

  • 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

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