Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the two entrepreneurs behind KaZaA and Skype, have been hard at work on their next killer service for a while now. Known as The Venice Project, the service is a streaming, peer-to-peer platform for video content that is poised as means to do to television what Skype did to telephony. Bloggers at GigaOM have managed to get a quick inside look at the service courtesy of one of its beta testers:

Let's talk instead about the service in general. I had heard from a lot of people who were lukewarm on the offering and were not impressed by the photo quality. I am not sure what happened, but those problems have been fixed. The visuals on a Lenovo T60 with a 15.2-inch screen were stunning and crisp. The streams came through without a problem and there was very little jitter. Still, no point hooking it up to a big screen TV... just yet! There isn't LIVE TV content on the service right now and most of what is there consists of meager offerings streaming off the Venice Project servers. So you can't truly judge how good this service will be when it comes to "live" broadcasts just yet.

There was a noticeable lag in switching channels, or between different menu choices. But as I said, these will go away with time. Setting up "my channels" was fairly simple. You just double-click and keep adding channels (or programs) you want to watch. Removing them was equally simple. It is very "dummy proof" and they have done a good job of organizing the service in a way that you can visually navigate without reading a manual.

I also liked that there are a lot of social elements built into the service. There is a "plugins" feature but not much there except the chat. You can chat with your buddies, or you can set up a "program or channel specific" chat network. I am guessing this is where a lot of innovation is going to come.

These guys are really full of good ideas. Only problem with this one will be bandwith/traffic Not many people will be able to use it :-(