Six years after KaZaA was forced to reform, co-founder Janus Friis, who went on to co-found Skype and Joost, offered this analysis of the P2P network’s demise…
“The timing was, like, way off – there was no way you could do anything – it was just too early,” the Dane said. Just as the new wave of platforms are doing nowadays, KaZaA approached record labels seeking licensing deals, Friis said. “The way to turn it into a real business would have been to make it advertising-supported so you could make it free – but we couldn’t do it.”
“We did get revenue from, like, banner advertising and things like this, but the revenue was scaling like this (holds hand low in the air) and the legal bills were coming in like this (holds hand high). I remember seeing legal bills of $500,000 per month, and that’s a lot for a startup – the only people who got rich were the attorneys.”
– Joost: One new tidbit on the London-based IPTV platform – “we see session times of 20 minutes, which proves quite a good engagement with the content when people get on”. And plans to enter the living room may be closer than we thought: “First we want people to use it on the computer – then what we really want to do is get people to use it on their TV, that’s probably the next frontier.” “Right now we’ve chosen to make it work on the bandwidth that’s easiest – we can certainly up that quality and have really high quality on the TV.”