AfterTek

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the internet billionaires behind Skype have signed up groups that include Endemol UK, the Big Brother producer, and Warner Music Group, the US music label, to supply content to their free online television service. The two men revealed yesterday that the service, which is expected to launched worldwide by the summer, will be called “Joost”.

Developed under the codename “The Venice Project”, its creators say it will combine “broadcast quality, full screen” internet television with features inspired by social networking sites, while safeguarding content companies against piracy.

Joost users will download free software from the company’s website, which will allow content to be streamed to a PC in the form of encrypted packages of data, designed to thwart pirates. Viewers will be able to access content on demand, but will not be able to download or store programmes.

The service will include a search capability and a “chat channel” feature that will allow viewers of the same programme to message each online. Employing a new “hybrid” technology model it will store content on a central database, but will also use a “peer-to-peer” network, formed from individual users’ PCs, to amplify its distributive power.

Messrs Friis and Zennström made an estimated $2.5 billion from the sale of Skype, the internet telephony group, to eBay last year. The pair were also responsible for KaZaA, the controversial online music sharing platform that at its height had an estimated 300 million users but fell foul of record labels who alleged it was “an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen”.

Joost, a separately-owned company, has also signed partnership deals with National Geographic, the documentary specialist, North One Television, a unit of ALL3MEDIA, the media group that is controlled by Permira, the private equity house, and September Films, the British producer behind It’s Now or Never for ITV and Beauty & The Geek for Channel 4.

Currently in tests, the service plans to make money through advertising. “At the moment we’re starting with a minute of advertising per hour and for the most part only one advertiser per piece of content,” a spokeswoman said. She added that Joost currently has around 1,000 hours of content and is in talks with several other content groups.

Last month, Channel 4 told The Times it was in talks to supply content to the service. Joost’s founders sport a stunning track record in building hugely popular software, but are entering a fiercely competitive market. Apple, Amazon and YouTube, the Google-owned site that last week announced a tie-up with NBC, all provide TV content online.

The YouTube-NBC tie-up was the latest in a slew of deals between traditional media players, eager to enter the online era, and an upstart internet rival. Mr Friis recently outlined the thinking behind Joost on his blog.

He said of conventional TV: “[People] hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. “And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the internet: tagging, recommendations, choice and so on…TV has 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that.”

The brains behind Skype and KaZaA, Niklas Zennström, 40, and Janus Friis, 30, have created software that has been downloaded by at least 450 million people worldwide, shaking up the telecoms and music industries in its wake. Both of those applications used peer-to-peer networks, technology also employed in Joost, which shifts the burden of distributing data from a single server to a mesh of users’ online PCs. The greater the number of users that enroll, the faster such a system becomes.

KaZaA’s subsequent owner became enmeshed in a series of lawsuits from music labels who claimed the platform aided a wave of online piracy. But Mssrs Zennström and Friis made their fortunes last year, when they sold Skype, which they co-founded in 2003 to eBay. The deal to sell Skype, since labelled “the fastest growing communications phenomenon in history”, earned them an estimated $2.5 billion.

Mr Zennström, a Swede who holds dual degrees in business and an MSc in Engineering Physics and computer science, now serves as chief executive of Skype. Mr Friis dropped out of high school in Denmark and is Skype’s director of strategy and innovation. Joost, a sideproject aimed at replicating their previous succeses in online TV, is separately owned.