Venice Project buzz

Venice is a collaboration between Skype and Kazaa to distribute IPTV over a P2P network. It seems to be gaining a lot of traction with industry buzz. It's currently only open to a group of private beta testers at the moment. You can be sure a lot of people will be watching closely to see how the next generation of "legal" content distribution works out. P2P was the scourge of the net, now it appears it could be the next big thing in legal distribution. Its amazing what happens when you embrace a technology instead of trying to sue it out of existence.

From the article:

Sure, they're bound by non-disclosure agreements, and we have no way to
verify that they actually are beta testers. But here's what we can
glean from the comment so far.

  • The platform runs well on Windows XP SP1 or SP2 (although SP2 is listed as a requirement
  • There's not much in the way of content yet, with MTV being one of the only major network on board at this point.
  • There's an Gmail-style invite system for the beta. And wouldn't you know it, the first eBay auction for an invite has already popped up.