Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström have given some details of their planned peer-to-peer video delivery service, The Venice Project (www.veniceproject.com)
BusinessWeek, which broke the news of the project in July, has been given a demonstration of the planned service and describes it as "combining professionally produced TV and video with the interactive tools of the Web." It quotes Friis as saying he expects the service, currently in very limited beta with about 100 users, to be generally available by year end.
The pair is hoping that a range of small, medium, and large media and TV companies will place their full-length, professionally produced content on the network and they expect to generate revenue from advertising.
BusinessWeek described the service as turning the PC into a TV screen but with many more capabilities. "Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels."
According to BusinessWeek the system, like Friis & Zennström's earlier ventures, KaZaA and Skype, uses peer-to-peer technology rather than central servers and streams content to the viewer but does not download it onto the viewer's PC.
Interviewed by blogger, Om Malik, Friis described The Venice Project as "a streaming P2P platform for television." He claimed it would be "good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers...Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that.
He claimed the service would deliver "near television quality" and would require around 1Mbps of bandwidth.
Friis and Zennström's KaZaA and Skype services were both built on the Joltid Global Index software, owned by a Joltid Limited in which they hold equity. Friis told Malik that, for the Venice Project "We have developed a P2P video streaming layer on top of that core [Global Index] technology."
David Bass
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