Venice Project - Will It Be Viral

What does Kazaa, Skype and Venice Project have in common? The quick answer would be they all were the creations of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the innovators of the modern era. But take a look at their business model. FREE is the word written all over it. The free music, free calls and the latest free Internet television.

The hype is already built based on the success stories of Skype and Kazaa for this Venice Project. Even though the project is in early stages and not much people got a chance to preview them, I got an invite for which I have registered long back.

My quick thoughts on the service:

• Picture quality is pretty good
• the social interaction feature is built into the system

That’s the good news. But on the negative side, its NOT browser based. I needed to download 250MB of software to view the channel. Sure, I understand that viewing videos is going to eat my bandwidth, but I am not sure if it is going to be really viral like Skype. Other than Korea and US, the most consumers of bandwidth, it will really have hard time reaching the public.

The idea is really innovative and kudos to that. It will take long time to become viral unlike Skype.