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Founders of Skype to Disrupt TV Status Quo

Informitv reports that the creators of Kazaa and Skype will announce the launch of their latest venture, aimed at distributing television and video over the internet, at a conference on the future of television in New York in November.

Codenamed 'The Venice Project,' it is claimed to combine the best things about television with the social power of the internet. Fredrik de Wahl, the chief executive of The Venice Project, is among the keynote speakers at the 'Future of Television Forum' in New York. He will give the first exclusive presentation of the project at the conference.

The Venice Project has been developed in stealth mode and is currently in a limited beta test. The team says it will redefine the way people think about television, but states that it is not a file-sharing application or a video download service.

The main backers of the project are Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who were both responsible for the Kazaa file-sharing system and the Skype peer-to-peer phone network.

Janus Friis has said that they are creating a streaming peer-to-peer platform for television. It is understood to be a video streaming layer built on top of the global index technology that provides the foundation for Skype.

The Venice Project is apparently codenamed after an independent film of that name set in Venice, Italy and Venice, California. The Future of Television Forum takes place at the NYU Stern School of Business in New York on 16-17 November 2006.

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