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Skype now plans to offer free films and television(Business, The (London) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Nov. 18--Skype, the service that pioneered free internet phone calls, will this week launch another service offering free films and TV programmes. The plan is likely to run into opposition from content owners such as television companies and Hollywood studios. Their fear will be that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis's service will inadvertently allow the free transfer of copyrighted material, as happened with their peer-to-peer music file sharing service Kazaa. It was pursued around the world by the legal department of the big music labels. The pair have been secretly developing the new service with a small group of users under the codename the Venice Project. The service will be supported by advertising. Videos will be streamed to computer screens and will not be stored on the computer once they have been watched. This ostensibly offers content owners some protection against viewers pirating and exchanging copyrighted material as they did with Kazaa. Zennstrom and Friis plan to use the Future of Television Forum in New York at the end of this week to unveil a video website that offers free high-definition downloads of films and television shows on computers. All viewers have to do is download Venice Project software from the internet on to their computers. This allows them to open a full-screen window displaying high definition films and videos. To see more of The Business, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.thebusinessonline.com. Copyright (c) 2006, The Business, London Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |