Exclusive: Inside The Venice Project, Built On Mozilla
The Venice Project is not just another online video start-up. The Luxembourg-based company is the latest co-production of the two-person hit factory of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The founders of Kazaa and Skype are hoping …
Context & Ripple Effects
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the pair behind Kazaa and Skype, have opened up on their next act: the Luxembourg-based Venice Project, an online video service whose client is built on Mozilla technology rather than proprietary middleware. It is their third swing at rebuilding a media distribution layer from scratch, after file-sharing and then voice.
The reveal lands one week after Ars Technica asked whether the service would become net neutrality's calling card — a framing that matters because a peer-to-peer-style video platform would push large volumes of traffic through consumer connections, putting the project directly inside the ISP-versus-content argument rather than beside it.
First-order effects
- Mozilla gets its most prominent consumer-media deployment to date, validating its stack beyond the browser as the substrate for a television-class viewing application.
- Content owners and broadcasters gain a new, credibly funded distribution bidder — backed by founders with a track record of scaling consumer networks — at a moment when YouTube-style clip sharing dominates attention but not long-form TV delivery.
Second-order effects
- ISPs become the immediate pressure point: heavy video distribution over consumer connections revives the bandwidth-cost fight that the earlier coverage tied to net neutrality, forcing carriers into a public position they had mostly avoided with text-and-voice services.
- Incumbent video players — Google's YouTube above all — face a competitor attacking the long-form, lean-back end of the market their architecture was not built for, pressuring them to answer on delivery economics rather than catalog size alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural shift is internet video splitting into two architectures — centralized streaming versus distributed delivery — with whoever wins setting how television economics migrate onto the open internet.
- The repeat playbook itself is the deeper signal: the same two founders serially building disruptive distribution layers (file-sharing, voice, now video) makes founder track record, not content libraries, the scarce asset investors price in next-generation media startups.
The trend: Serial P2P founders are applying the Kazaa-Skype distribution playbook to television, turning online video from a clips business into a broadband infrastructure question.