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The Venice Project
By jpenston | October 5, 2006 |
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The founders of Skype and Kazaa are at it again. They have announced that they are establishing the Venice Project, which is a rather grand name for an IP TV distribution network. Instead of Voice calls or pirate software, you will be able to get films and videos.
Using their tried and trusted peer to peer approach, although this time with content rights secured up front, they promise to bring high quality TV to users homes. No need to change your ISP. In fact, the ISP is irrelevant…
And this is where the problem lies. IP TV requires huge amounts of capacity, whether streamed or peer to peer doesn’t actually matter as the same number of 1s and 0s need to reach the user’s home.
And who is paying for these bits and bytes? ISPs of course, but who gets paid for the Venice Project content? Everyone but the companies that are footing the infrastructure bill. I keep thinking that this madness can’t last, that eventually the ISPs will see that this is a huge black hole and decide that they do have to restrict the content they send over their pipes. But it keeps going…
Block this and all your subscribers will go to your competitors who will allow it, of course! Really? And if they do, is it such a bad thing that your competitor becomes a magnet for all your power users? Ask PlusNet, or Zen whether they’d like less power users and more “regular” punters…
Wouldn’t it be terrible if you were left with a hundred of thousands of low usage customers because you traffic managed peer to peer…? Wouldn’t it be terrible if those that did want IP TV from you could get it because you also have content rights agreements, after all… And wouldn’t it be terrible if you were putting a multicast infrastructure in place, to manage all this traffic efficiently… Wouldn’t it be terrible to have BTs foresight?
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