In one of the papers published here “Strategy Models for the Mobile Industry with the Rise of Wireless VoIP” we talked about the high potentials that skype could have in a mid-long term. One of them was radio sindication, which is basically the re-selling of radio to users using the cost benefits of the P2P network.
Ok, I have to confess that they are always one step ahead. The Skype creators: Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis after making the world-wide successful Kazaa and Skype, got into “The venice project”. This project is being developed basically to create a cousin of SKY and DirectTV (Now 1 company under the SKY name) but this time deilvering TV content through the internet (obviously using a P2P network, as they are now used to).
Sources tell that:
“Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of top software developers in about a half-dozen cities around the world, including New York, London, and Venice.”
And that there are also working on negotiations with the most important TV networks to establish this time agreements of television content broadcasting. This time, they have learned the lesson, after all the sues and legal problems they had with Kazaa because of the ilegal sharing of copyrighted material.
Skype, as always, is not really a first mover, but it really knows how to mess everything around and get a massive audience in a very short time. The real innovator in this broadcasting matters is www.youtube.com that has gained a really big audience but has an advertising-based business model (as they claim in their website) different from the premium-service model of skype. Recently, the “I-can-do-all” Google lauched a similar (if not equal) initiative http://video.google.com that is also advertising based.
In just a matter of few months, we’ll see who will own this “new” internet-tv business, and also which other players will join the match. I’m just waiting the moment, when I can see my favorite Colombian-tv-shows from wherever I am, arrives. I know it would take a while, but I have big hopes!