"The Venice Project" is now "Joost" officially

Joost is a new venture of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and kazaa). The pair plans to develop software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer tv technology.

The program is based on P2PTV technology and is expected to deliver near-TV resolution images. As opposed to streaming technology (servers -> clients) P2P TV technology (streams are resent from multiple viewers to new viewers) moves the distribution costs from the channel owner to the internet service providers. P2P TV technology is less efficient than streaming technology since it requires more global upstream capacity than downstream requests. CDN technology offers best of both worlds: no centralized servers and still high volume viewers.

The project is in beta testing currently.