Skype, Sony Working to Offer On-Demand iTunes Rivals

The field of on-demand video services continues to grow. Both Sony and Skype have announced their intentions to challenge the dominance of iTunes via download services. Sony is going to be offering movie downloads via the PSP, no doubt as a partial rebuff to Microsoft's entry into the field. Meanwhile, Skype is planning to roll out a broadband television service they are calling 'the Venice Project'. Funded with the money made when Skype was sold to eBay, the beta version was apparently launched last week. From the article: "On his blog, Mr Friis said the partners had been 'quietly testing with a small circle of people' for a few months, and that they would now expand the circle. The service will offer high-quality programs through an ad-supported platform. The project aims to bring quality TV programs free to consumers who have a broadband internet connection, the spokesman said."

Comments

Nothing to do with Skype

[ballyhoo]

This company is funded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, not by Skype. The Venice Project is as unrelated to Skype as Skype is to Kazaa.

Not Skype

[hanssprudel]

This the Skype foundrs, Zennström and Friis using the money they made selling Skype to create a new service. Skype is a product of eBay, and eBay are not involved in this.

An interesting question is whether they will be using P2P filesharing techniques for video distribution the way they did for for VOIP with Skype. One thinks bittorrent and other types of swarming, but it seems more difficult to apply here (Bittorrent based protocols work by having people download different parts of the file, which is difficult to apply to a stream.)

Not sure XBox 360 will ever be the king

[Infonaut]

If MS were to incorporate free content (sans DRM), offer MUCH larger hard drives for the 360 (120 GB+), and improve their interface (adding search capability, and RSS feed-like subscription option, etc. like iTunes) they would be the kings.

The first barrier to MS dominating the download market is that in order to use the wonderful service, you have to buy an XBox 360. Non-gamers (and there are a few of them out there) are uninterested in buying a console merely to replicate features they can already get on their computer.