• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 18, 2006

The Venice Project, the code-name for a super secret online video file-sharing service that has people buzzing it will transform the business of television, quietly launched its beta testing on Friday, inviting thousands of people to begin using the service to help its developers work out its early bugs. The buzz comes in no small part from the fast that its developers are the same people who shook up the music industry with Kazaa and the telephone industry with Skype, online services that utilized the power of peer-to-peer file-sharing to disrupt big, established players.

Although few details are known about how the Venice Project actually works, they will become increasingly public as beta testers begin using it. In a letter sent to prospective testers on Friday, Venice Project CEO Fredrik de Wahl said the service would enable "better content surfing, improvements to the installer, an elegant [user interface] and "While we're still in beta, we feel we have a strong proof of concept and we know that we'll be able to count on you to help us uncover any bugs and glitches and provide recommendations, so that we can make The Venice Project ready for the whole world to enjoy," de Wahl wrote.

While little else is known about the Venice Project, the organization's blog indicates it plans to do something different from earlier incarnations of peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Kaza: it will work only in a copyrighted framework. That's something that should ease the anxiety of the major TV networks and studios, even as they wait to find out exactly how the Venice Project will impact their businesses. But the buzz at this point is that it could be every bit as transformational as Disney's deal with Apple's iTunes was a year ago.

"We are in the process of launching a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet," one of its developers, Henrik Werdelin, wrote recently on the project's blog. "All content on The Venice platform is provided by content owners directly, and it's all protected with the highest standard of encryption and we are working within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) framework to ensure that it complies with appropriate content protection and ownership regulations."