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Skype Founders Develop Media Streaming Tech
[RnP]Venom writes "It appears that after selling Skype to Ebay, Skype founders Janus and Niklas haven't been resting on their laurels. As reported by ZDNet, and the International Herald Tribune, they have been hard at work developing a new TV streaming application called Joost. With as little as 6,000 people currently testing the project details are a bit scarce, but if it does remotely as well as their Phone/IM success, it could be a real treat. From the IHT article: 'Joost may eventually try to move onto television sets, but the company said it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer. Similar to the Skype model, Joost users will download free software -- this time to help them browse for channels and clips they're interested in. One of the company's executives, Henrik Werdelin, said in a videotaped interview that Joost aims to keep the quality of television programming, its picture quality and its ease of use, but improve other aspects.'"
This has been on Slashdot a couple of times before. I'm wondering where they'll get the content from. In fact, I'm not sure who sources the content in a technical sense. Since it's those guys, I'd assume the source is a peer, and not a central server. Or is it a central server, with peers just helping with the distribution?
Anyway, they'll have a hard time delivering a TV like experience without TV like content. Purely YouTube style short movies won't cut it. Maybe they're building on the peers redistributing copyrighted content, but that didn't work out to well in the end for Kazaa.
Maybe they'll convince movie/TV studios to distribute their content, but what's in it for them? Ads?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I doubt it'll work on a C64 either.
Sometimes you just have to accept that the cool new thing MIGHT just need technology from this decade.
You know, there's a reason we have the ability to post anonymously here...
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