Niklas Zenström and Janus Friis financed The Venice Project with the development of a peer-to-peer video distribution system now called 'Joost'. Their approach differs highly from the aim of their former ventures Kazaa and Skype, explains chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik *). Joost should make money, so tries to make friends in the tv-market. It's definitely not disruptive, we must believe. "It's a sheep." With a sheep or a wolf in it's clothing?
"I first met Niklas and Janus long ago at Tele 2, the European phone company from Sweden. There has been talk about this project for seven, eight years perhaps, with all sort of ideas: how we could do television over the internet? What would be possible? What do people want in there television? Where would we find the content? However until quite recently there wasn't simply enough bandwidth to people their homes to do this.
So the start of The Venice Project was triggered by a combination of things: the bandwidth to homes being sufficient , enough real broadband connections. Some countries are advanced like for example France with regional and local fiber optic networks. Other countries, like for example the United States and The Netherlands somewhat lack real high bandwidth connections, although some fiber-projects look very good.
Secondly the availability of content in the market started by iTunes but others following. The content industry is becoming interested in new ways of distribution. They are now getting used tot the idea of less control over distribution, of new partners, of streaming technology and all kind of models. These are no longer alien to the business models of the big content owners.
The third important factor was de sale of Skype to eBay, so there was a certain amount of cash available to invest. These things have all conspired to the start of the Venice Project in January 2006."
Dirk-Willem van Gulik
So the project is only one year old?
"We started hiring back in January 2006, the first persons started working for the company late February. First serious coding just started late May. But we did a bug chunk of upfront thinking before this."
How did you build up your technical strategy and how was it changed over time?
"The Venice Project has been in our minds for a while so we didn't have to plan all that much. Some important common things we need to have in place like suitable hard- and software and our own peer-to-peer network up and running where well understood.
The business part is the hardest. We needed to transcode content from one format in another format. We needed to develop advertising targeting. We needed to look of the requirements in different countries in order to comply with all the regulations.
Now that the software is up and running, we more and more concentrate on implementing the business requirements. We specify how the content can be configured, how much control the user may have over the content, and possibilities for advertisers."
Core is content
It seems rather simple to build this, in a very short time. What makes it still exclusive system?
"It is in fact quite simple. About 90 per cent, or even more of our code, is not written by us. We use large building blocks from the open source community, from some commercial vendors, and we integrate these. So by and large this project is, from a technical perspective not rocket science. It's basically integrating large chunks of code and combining them.
Of course this is not the case for the company as a whole. The core of the company is not technology but it's content, it's advertising, it is about the business model for revenue sharing. The hardest nuts to crack are definitely on the business site.
Of second importance is the user interface. Success is only possible when anyone can install and use the client easily, quickly. We spend a lot of time on making the user interface so intuitive and easy as possible. We still are far from where we want to be, but we've set the stage.
The third thing that sets us apart is the peer-to-peer system, proven technology, Skype is based on the same framework, which is robust, which is secure and well-understood. That helps tremendously."
Is Joost software to replicate for anyone with p2p and torrent-knowledge?
"Not easily; knowledge alone is not enough. There is a tremendous amount of engineering needed - and each network is uniquely tuned
We see a lot of competitors out there who do a large part of the story really well. We see other people build a really nice player, we see good webshops for downloads, we see really nice tv-sites, really good advertising targeting.
But we see none of them offering it all. We try to do each of these, and to also do each of them well. We may not be the best in every aspect, but we surely do them well.
That combination and approach is quite unique. With that we are able to be a neutral party, not connected to one of the five big media conglomerates, nor to any other company with interests in these markets.
So we see ourselves as a sheep in sheeps clothing, there's nothing scary about us at all. We are exactly what we are, and you do not need to worry that we may be controlled by one of your worst competitors. This makes it easy to talk with advertisers and content providers. We isolate ourselves a little bit from the fierce competition between content companies."
