Roxio Labs

You can feel it in the air: there’s an imminent rise in demand for video distributed over the web. At the same time, some are foretelling that existing content delivery networks can’t handle the bandwidth requirements. Enter companies like BitTorrent, RedSwoosh, and the yet-to-be-unveiled “The Venice Project”, which is founded by the same folks who founded Kazaa and Skype. All of these are P2P technologies that are targeting video for download. RedSwoosh recently received a round of VC funding and BitTorrent is rumored to be close to a $15 to $25 million dollar round of funding (http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-partners-with-tv-and-movie-companies), which is more than a casual amount.

Personally, I won’t be doing much video watching on my computer. Maybe I’m just too old. However, I can imagine a younger generation that will opt for no TV in the room in lieu of a computer, as long as the right premium content is available for download. In any case, there’s still the living room viewing experience, which isn’t going away for a long, long time. That’s where I think this P2P technology gets really interesting. If it were to end up in set top boxes like Tivo and Xbox then it’s a wining situation for everyone: consumers can download high resolution video faster and content owners save money in distribution. Additionally, the nastiness that comes with P2P (spyware-like clients, hard drive space taken, and general sense of ‘personal’ taken out of the computer) would be hidden inside a black box.

In the more immediate time frame, keep an eye out for the release of The Venice Project, which I believe is due any time now. Given the founders’ track record, I’m expecting it to be an interesting product.