• Wired, Friday, January 19, 2007 11:31 AM

Wired talks to bona fide media disruptors Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstr"m, the men who just launched their next potential media bomb Joost, the Web TV venture formerly known as "The Venice Project." Author Fred Vogelstein talks of his experience demo-ing the service, and he's suitably impressed, particularly by the quality with which it delivers TV content over today's broadband Web connections.

Friis treats him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, a National Geographic special and re-runs of "Rocky and Bullwinkle," then turns to him and says proudly, "It even looks pretty good hooked up to my plasma."

Aside from good quality, what's so special about Joost? It's a functioning real-time social network. Watch a show then rate it, share it, and chat with friends using its IM platform. As usage ramps up, there will soon be community chat, letting legions of, say, cricket fans across the globe gather to watch matches together. It's customizable too, so if you only want to share the experience with a few friends, you could.

Zennstr"m and Friis are the co-founders of KaZaa, the open file-sharing network that continues to be the scourge of music, movie and TV producers everywhere, and Skype, the voiceover IP phone service they sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

The vision for Joost is to merge each of these ideas into a universal on-demand TV system running on a hybrid peer-to-peer platform. This creates millions of networked TVs fortified like KaZaa-like video (instead of file) servers. A free download, Joost instantly becomes a potential YouTube and MySpace killer. And it will be ad-supported. As ever, the lingering question is whether the studios will bite. For now, the service needs users.

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