Wall St. has to wonder what the fine print looks like in the sales documents from the Ebay (EBAY) purchase of Skype. It must read that, after we buy your VoIP company for a ludicrous price, please use the money to start a promising tech company in the ultra-hot video industry.
The founders of Skype and file-sharing company KaZaA have launched a new firm that will use peer-to-peer tech to send television shows and movies to PCs all over the world. The company also appears to be lining up some major content owners to be part of the venture. Targeted advertising will be another part of the revenue base.
The use of peer-to-peer technology will utilize the customers’ PCs as "mini servers" to forward content to other customers. The operation is, therefore, inexpensive to run and should not require a huge edge-server provider like Akamai.
There is the temptation to write the new video company, the Venise Project, as yet another in a string of video-to-the-home start-ups that has little chance of succeeding. But, given the management provenance of the company, that would be a mistake.
Skype and KaZaA both signed up tens of millions of customers in relatively short time periods. It could be argued the Skype did as much or more to change the traditional telephone industry as any company in the last few decades.
"Disruptive technology" is an overused term. Let’s use it here anyway.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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