The founders of internet telephony firm Skype have unveiled a peer-to-peer television service that will be free to users. Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis say they “combined the best of TV and the best of the internet” in a venture called Joost, which enables people to watch television online with “choice, control and flexibility.”The pair are the entrepreneurs behind peer-to-peer companies Kazaa and Skype, which was bought by US-based eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005. Joost is also “piracy-proof”, its founders claim, having been crafted to prevent content being copied, thus guaranteeing copyright protection for creators and owners of content. Content will be seeded from one of Joost’s computer servers and is then shared between users in a peer-to-peer format; users receiving data from one another’s computers.
Read this article from New Scientist, one from WIRED and another from Ars Technica. Screenshots from GigaOM More P2P Tv from Wikipedia. On topic: Constance Ledoux Book & Brooke Barnett’s PCTV: Consumers, Expectancy-Value and Likely Adoption (access to the full article requires a subscription or fee) from the November 2006 issue of Convergence.
