P2P is NOT evil image uploaded to Flickr by gruntzooki

I have argued before that one of the drawbacks to current streaming video distribution platforms (eg. YouTube) is that they are point-to-point downloads, making them expensive and prone to stream interruptions due to packet loss. Improving the way online users upload and share video content is a clear market need and the solution might be the good old P2P systems.

Interestingly, Gigaom recently interviewed Skype co-founder Janus Friis on their new venture: The Venice Project.

In a nutshell, The Venice Project will build on their experience at developing P2P networks at KaZaa (music) and Skype (telephony) to create a P2P network for online TV/video content… and this time they will protect the content owner’s copyrights.

Today, there are some solid P2P distribution solutions trying to address this need in the market place, but they tend to be focused on the needs of the publisher (e.g. Akamai ) or the ISP (e.g. Velocix).

Still, the killer consumer application will likely be the one that succeeds in delivering a nice web interface to P2P distribution of video and makes file sharing accessible to the average user. In other words, the one that takes current platforms like Bittorrent or PPLive into the mainstream.

One emerging candidate is Red Swoosh. The company doesn’t make a secret of its recipe to kill YouTube but it still requires downloading a client. Another interesting one is Sky Rider, which recently received $8M in funding. Another fascinating approach is that of CoralCDN, which Isabel Wang described in this great post.

It is too early to see if The Venice Project could become a market leader the same way Skype became an hassle-free way to communicate with voice and video at better quality than competitors (I look forward to taking part in the next Venice beta phase).

Still, as with other P2P inventions, the winner might end up being an underdog startup with little regard to copyright that decides to give the users what they want: unfiltered access to all types of video material in a cheap, efficient and user-friendly way… or why not, maybe YouTube decides to go P2P soon.

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Ingrid Li reminded me of Veoh as another P2P player be taken into account - it also seems like they might be moving from a client-based to a web-based solution
Pete Cahsmore at Mashable talks about how P2P might have been one of the key drivers for Sony to acquire Grouper
Scott Jarkoff has a great post on why embracing file-sharing is essential for industry survival
Chris Anderson had this great discussion with Bram Cohen (founder of Bittorrent) on how to get TV content owners to adopt P2P