By now you've read the BusinessWeek interview with Janus Friis and Om Malik's interview with Friis. The Venice Project is Friis and Zenstrom's video play. We still can't believe eBay let them build this outside of Skype. As I wrote in July, The Venice Project steals an opportunity from SkypeBay by not building video distribution into Skype's network. The whole point of Skypenomics was to bring eBay (c2c cash-for-atoms) into the intangibles economy.

21talks sees the problem when asking: "Does it mean that sharing TV content could be already available through Skype and its video functionality? At an average quality and requiring a small to medium size bandwidth. Is their next move to combine the Skype's, Kazaa's and Venice Project's networks to enhance the general quality of service of the service?" Sorry, but the few indications say no.

They are designing this new network to follow the money, fitting its rules and architecture to the special needs of the content producers and advertisers. I'm sure they won't have any problem lining up anchor tenants like television channels and movie archives for their DRM'd TV streaming network. If you want a taste of the TVP experience, sign up for a very limited Beta Test of the client.

I can only hope eBay owns a little of Baaima N.V., the Netherlands Antilles limited company doing business as The Venice Project.