Patrick wrote a post on “The New Must See TV” on Friday and I know that he wanted to include some information on The Venice Project but was unable to say much because of the NDA that we signed. However, it looks like Om was not under the same constraints as his excellent and informative NewTeeVee post goes into a lot of detail about the company. Both Om and Mike Arrington at Techcrunch comment that they see two key hurdles for TVP which I think are surmountable, but I believe that a third hurdle exists that will limit TVP’s eventual scale.

1. TVP lacks compelling content

I haven’t seen the NDA material so my thoughts here may be way off base, but I don’t think that a lack of compelling content today is likely to be a long term hurdle.

Much has been written about the long tail of video content, all of which is legitimate. However, its no accident that Youtube is now pursuing licensing agreements from the major TV networks, music labels and movie studios. Long tail notwithstanding, as even Chris Anderson says, “Hits aren’t dead”.
Furthermore, the major studios and networks seem to have turned a corner on their willingness to license their content. When startups like Guba, Wurld Media and Bit Torrent can get licensing deals done with major studios, its pretty clear that the policy rubicon has been crossed, and now the only haggling to be done is on price. As soon as TVP is willing to pay the prices asked, it can get content.

2. TVP requires a download

Requiring a download is certainly a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one, as the founders of TVP have demonstrated twice before, with both Skype and Kazaa. However, both Skype and Kazaa are clients that benefit from obvious network effects, as do many other successful consumer clients such as AIM, ICQ, Y! Messenger, Bittorrent, Limewire, Morpheus etc. Other successful downloads that do not benefit from the network effect have mostly been focused on security concerns, including the Firefox browser and the many anti Adware/Spyware products. One of TVP’s challenges will be how to balance making its network effects obvious with the likely desire of content owners to keep some level of control over their content. The social aspects that they’ve built into the product are certainly a good start. I haven’t peered behind the NDA curtain on this issue so don’t have any further PoV on the matter.

3. High quality video is too bandwidth intensive

The issue that I think may be underestimated is that of bandwidth. Om alludes to this issue in his post and seems to give the benefit of the doubt to TVP, although he points out that TVP would require 250MB/hour which is enough to violate many ISP’s terms of service. Video is an incredibly bandwidth intensive application, especially at higher quality levels. At high levels of penetration, even p2p solutions are not sufficient to support high quliaty video streaming because of asymmetries in the upload/download bandwidth for most consumer’s broadband connections. If TVP is successful to Skype like levels, then there simply isn’t enough upstream bandwidth from peers to fulfil the downstream bandwidth demand from users who are trying to watch high quality video. Most upstream bandwidth pipes are only 1/5 to 1/10 the size of downstream bandwith.

Now this only becomes a problem at real scale, but it may put a cap on how big TVP can become before video quality becomes degraded or expensive server farms need to go into place to supplement peer delivery. Jeremy Riemer makes a similar point at ArsTechnica.

None the less, althought there is likely no VC investment opportunity here, this will be an interesting company to watch!