Why Joost Is Good for TV
By Spencer Reiss | Wired
Jan, 17, 2007
In a 10th-floor office a few block south of New York's Union Square, gangly Janus Friis folds himself into an undersize chair. He's here from London for a couple of days, toting a ThinkPad with demo aboard. A little white sticker on the machine's lid reads in retro-shiny silver letters: THE VENICE PROJECT. Friis, 30, is half of the most feared digital tag team since Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page marched across the Net. He's the visionary, a shy Dane in beat-up jeans and loud shirts. Niklas Zennström, an amiable 40-year-old Swede, wears the suit. Together, the pair has spent the past six years bit-bombing the Net's biggest and most vulnerable targets. Kazaa, their free file-sharing network, mushroomed amid the wreckage of the original Napster; it was managing 3 million downloads a month in 2001 when entertainment industry lawyers moved in. Next they built Skype, the free voice-over-IP telephone system, and sold it to eBay just over a year ago for $2.6 billion. That figure alone guarantees that their calls get returned.
[...]
Friis, whose role in Skype is mainly advisory, plays his part to the hilt, too: director of disruption. "YouTube, Google, Skype -- we're transforming whole industries into layers of software and making them more powerful at the same time. Before, it took a huge investment to reach a big audience -- transmitters and studios and satellite links. Now you can just be Lonelygirl15." The mind-bender is that, once upon a time, the Net was supposed to kill television. Now two of the Net's boldest entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent television. And not just broadcast technology but the user interface, the ads, the whole experience. Television perfected!
[...]
Continued: wired.com
Developments in this space are occurring rapid-fire. Note in the chart below the absence of "Babelgum," which was the subject of my previous post. Also, the NetFlix streaming option that was released two days ago is likewise missing.
One wonders how many other platforms are sitting on a perch, waiting to be released. From one of the thumbnails in the article above:
------ |
