The Venice Project - the devil starts to emerge from the details

There is a very good article over here on GigaOm outlining a lot of what is under the bonnet of the Venice Project.

My reservation about TVP is not what it is, but what it is doing. As Om notes in his interview with (CTO / CEO?) Fredrik de Wahl:

He points out that the system is built for content owners to not only expand online, but also retain their branding, and monetize that content as well.

He argues that ...since the company will be able to offer global-sized audiences to the professional content creators, TVP will attract more and more content. Of course everyone is trying to do exactly that, including a Google-gobbled YouTube8 and well-funded start-ups such as Brightcove9!

But de Wahl argues that the Venice Project platform can deliver content geo-targeting, and more-focused advertising. “Anyone, even a small professional producer of content can instantly go public,” he says, and just for effect says, “NBC can create 500 niche channels.”

Now these guys do have a history of skinning cats better than competitors (after all, p2p music and VoIP were hardly bleeding edge when they got into it, but they did it darned well) - but in this case, as Om notes, it is a very crowded space already.

The Venice Argument, as I understand it, is that its much better targeting and measurement capability will make it more desirable to advertisers than broadcast or other competing Web TV plays. This may be true - but, there is probably a "good enough" that broadcasters can hang on to for quite a while.

And, as opposed to Music and Telephony, a lot of TV content is already free to air, so will the consumer motivation to adopt be as strong?.