By David Ponce
The Venice Project, the upcoming online television startup from Kazaa and Skype founders has now acquired an official name: Joost. While we won’t comment on the name itself, let us give you a quick summary of the service in case you’re not familiar.
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are two Swedish men with a knack for creating disruptive technology. First they turned the music distribution model on its head with Kazaa (sure, Napster came first, but Kazaa took it to the masses), then they poked a huge hole into the phone business with Skype. Both services share P2P at the core of their technology. And now, they’re set to take on yet another ailing institution: television.
For the last few months, they’ve been working on a project that until now has been named The Venice Project. Now named Joost, the service will consist of a downloadable software based on the Mozilla framework. It aims to improve and build upon what the likes of YouTube, Metacafe and Brightcove are doing by giving both content users and producers superior video distribution (and monetization) tools.
And let me tell you, it all looks very purdy. Right now, the service is still in Beta, but we’ve included a bunch of screenshots inside.
