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 that The Venice Project will upend the television experience just as their earlier efforts turned the music and phone businesses on their respective heads.
And while the glam duo might hog the headlines, the task of making the Venice Project a reality falls on the shoulders of Fredrik de Wahl, a lanky Swede with a quiet demeanor who has been a cohort of Messrs. Zennstrom and Friis for more than half a decade.
Unlike many of his Silicon Valley counterparts de Wahl prefers to stay out of the limelight. Sipping on his steaming hot, standard-issue Starbucks coffee, de Wahl outlined the vision for the Venice Project and answered our questions about Venice Project’s underlying technologies and why it is different from Skype and Kazaa.
In our two-hour long conversation, it became clear that while unlike Skype TVP is looking to work with incumbent content owners and networks, the rest of the game is being called from the same playbook.
The Venice Project, Skype, Niklas Zennstrom, Online Video, Fredrik de Wahl, Startup, Janus Friis
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