The Venice Project - the Future of TV?

Here's something interesting from TV's future: the Venice Project, "a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet". The project tries to improve the TV experience by removing "artificial limits such as the number of channels that your cable or the airwaves can carry and then bringing it into the internet age; adding community features, interactivity".

The new service comes from the same people that created Kazaa and Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. For the moment, the Venice Project is in closed beta.

Janus explains: "We are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!"