Thursday, October 5, 2006

Om Malik has a short interview with Skype co-founder Janus Friis talking about Janus and Niklas’ new peer-to-peer system, the Venice Project.  It’s a peer-to-peer system for sharing television.  With Skype and Kazaa, these guys disrupted whole industries.  This time around, they’re too late.  Here’s why:

1. The world already has more video sharing networks than you can shake a stick at.  With YouTube, Revver, and countless others out there, who needs another way to share video?

2. Kazaa consumed kilobits per second of bandwidth. Skype, even less.  Quality video needs megabits.  Peer to peer might have been great for low bandwidth communications like voice, but if you think I’m going to let a peer media relay ship video streams through my network pipe, I’ve got news for you! 

3. The big media players are already doing their own thing.  FOX Interactive is delivering television shows via MySpace.  ABC, NBC, CBS, Disney – they’re all at it too.  They don’t need a new “global peer to peer platform” to deliver their video.

And check this excerpt from the interview out:

OM: Does the Venice Project use the same core underlying technologies that were used in Kazaa and Skype?

JF: 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. (*)

(*) Om’s Notes: The Global Index mentioned by Janus is actually Joltid Global Index Software that is owned by a company called Joltid Limited, in which Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have an equity interest. The company was not part of the Skype-Ebay transaction.

So, if EBay didn’t buy the technology, then what did they buy?  Did they spend $4.1 Billion for the Skype user base?

Nah… couldn’t be. 

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