iTechNote

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of Skype, are set to launch a global broadband television service in 2007, promising viewers, content owners, advertisers the best of the internet coupled with the best of TV. The project is The Venice Project.

The project is a type of IPTV where a digital television service is delivered using the Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure. The advantages of IPTV include interactive and personalized service, video-on-demand (VOD) and convergence of ICT services.

Traditionally, there are two main hurdles for IPTV - bandwidth and content protection. Friis and Zennstrom believe they have pretty good answer to these problems.

IPTV is very sensitive to packet loss and delays. The bandwidth demand for IPTV is a huge leap as compared to VOIP. On average, Skype only uses 3-16 kbps while IPTV starts with hundreds of kbps. However, Friis believes that the bandwidth available to the general household has reached a point where IPTV is ready for the prime time.

The solution is distributed streaming using P2P technology. The technology solves both the bandwidth and content protection concerns. There are no central servers involved in the new service and each user plays a role in distributing real time video streams. Furthermore, there is no digital rights management (DRM) protection in place because the bits and bytes that the end user PC collects are only fragments of a stream.

It remains to be seen to what extent can Venice Project solve these problems. P2P technology has its own limitations.

The quality of P2P bandwidth cannot be guaranteed. If a user opts for VOD that has few viewers, she may end up having difficulties watching a program. Without content protection schemes in place, content pirates can develop software that write bits and bytes while it fast forwards the content. This software is readily available for existing video streaming technology such as RTSP.

To know more about the technology, read here. You can also try out the service by signing up as a beta tester.