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New Video Venture from Skype Creators
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek reports that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (creators of Kazaa and Skype) are at work on a new project: 'software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web.' Calling the work 'The Venice Project,' Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of developers to tackle the problem. The developers are already in negotiations with TV networks to use the system.'" From the article: "This time around, Zennstrom and Friis are inviting the cooperation of TV producers and networks. While the exact nature of their business model isn't clear, they are talking to every TV network in town, according to one person familiar with the matter. The idea is to become a dominant TV distribution company for the Internet era, just as companies such as Comcast (CMSCA) have dominated TV distribution in the cable era."
In the peer to peer "revolution", the way forward was paved by these people. They weren't the first, but they mainstreamed it. Decentralized networks simply didn't exist in a fashion that had ever been applied or scaled in the way Kazaa did it, and even Bittorrent today doesnt have the level of resilience that the Kazaa supernode mesh does.
In the VOIP "revolution", the way forward was paved by these people. They weren't the first, but they mainstreamed it.
I see no reason to believe that if the same team applied the same work-ethos to video over TV that they couldn't do it, especially when transmitting audio is pretty similiar from a technical standpoint to transmitting video (Something Skype also now does), and the de-centralization technology has already been applied extensively and unarguably effectively in both Skype and Kazaa's networks.
The aim each time appears to be to develop something that takes off, brings a technology into the public consciousness, then sell it off to the highest bidder and move on to build technology for the next trend.
-Steve Gray
The evolution of TV on the Web isn't likely to look like a rerun of the legal battles over film and music on the Web.
What's the difference, anyway?
They are both media being distributed on the internet, you can buy TV shows in stores and online just like movies and music DVDs/CDs.
So all media should be treated the same and the lawsuits should stop, correct?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think the twins are onto somthing good here if you've been watching the progression of break.com and youtube.com . Since the videos will be coming from the tv stations, it's just a simple distribution system.
Hosted from a single site I could see bandwidth being an issue, but I think the draw of a p2p system isn't there. People used (still use, somewhat) p2p systems because of the draw of getting music/videos for free that someone didn't want them to. This is a legit system, and people are going to want a simple download. I imagine part of working it out is using multiple servers to split the load.
One other issue if they did use p2p would be licensing, namedly that BDE/Altnet Inc. own the patent of using a file hash on a p2p-type system. Stupid, but it exists and has technically held up in court. Granted easy to design a new system around it, but a con on the side of using p2p.
So, my bet is that it'll be on a multiple-server setup. That's my take at least as of now.
So, what I expect to see in reality is a setup like break.com where the videos only come from the tv stations(likely paying the venice project), and a fairly uninventive download method, riddled with advertisements. Oh, and DRM will definitely be in there, no doubt about it.
I think it'll work and people will visit often, but I don't think it'll be ground-breaking.
if it can be done for one two dimensional image, surely it can be embedded in a single frame of a video file.
Not necessarily. The problem with the WMF issue was the method of reading the file. It doesn't get exponentially worse with video files because "there are more pictures". In fact, due to delta compression in most video codecs, there normally aren't an "single frames" stored as such.
It depends on whether the programs used on Windows Media files allow them to execute code or not.
If only the people spreading movies around were smart and would use MPEG4, this might not be an issue, due to the huge number of players and increased options for users. Either way, the windows media formats are uniformly poor at pretty much everything.
Nobody mentioned "exponentially worse", just that it was as likely and this network should expect to be targeted.
The fact that the have been two critical vulnerabilities (JPEG and WMF issues were unrelated) in relatively simply 2D decompression code means it is reasonable to expect the may be vulnerabilities in 3D code as well.
It is due to delta compression, and all the other complex mathematical filters applied to video that makes a vulnerability so likely. If loading a "single frame" bitmap off the disk into memory exposes a buffer overflow you have a very bad programmer. A complex system of highly speed optimised code covering network caching, decryption, decoding, decompression, and post processing is a very different matter.
The high number of MPEG4 players dose not equate to a high number of MPEG4 codecs; as the JPEG and WMF vulnerabilities showed by effecting very nearly all Windows programs that used these formats.