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Skype Inventors Prepare Web TV Service

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the creators of KaZaA and Skype, go into broadband TV services with money from the sale of Skype.

The inventors of Skype are believed to be working on a new Web TV service, currently dubbed "Venice Project."

The Financial Times said around six thousand people are already beta testing the new Web TV service from Skype's inventors.

After selling Skype to the biggest online marketplace, eBay, Friis and Zennstrom put some of the money into this new project (broadband TV service), built on a p2p technology.

Skype is a proprietary peer-to-peer Internet telephony (VoIP) network, founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the creators of KaZaA, and competing against established open VoIP protocols like SIP, IAX, or H.323.

The main difference between Skype and other VoIP clients is that it operates on a peer-to-peer model rather than the more traditional server-client model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralized and distributed among the nodes in the network, which means the network can scale very easily to large sizes (currently just over 100 million users) without a complex and costly centralized infrastructure.

About the same principles would be used in the WebTV service, which wants to offer free quality TV content to internet users across the world.