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Zennstrom and the TV Revolution

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 20 Feb 08, 08:53 GMT

must be the most important digital entrepreneur to have emerged in Europe over the last five years. He has given us free music with the file-sharing service, free phone calls through , and is now touting free television through his service. He has pioneered technologies which threaten to disrupt the music, telecoms and television industries - his only problem has been how to prove they can be profitable.

Last year Joost raised $45 million from investors - after initial funding from Zennstrom and his Skype co-founder - to launch a platform enabling TV firms to put their content in front of a global audience. There was a lot of hype and hope about this advertising-supported platform which was going to be the big winner from the internet television revolution, just as Skype had made internet telephony take off.

But when I interviewed Niklas Zennstrom at a networking event in London this week, he conceded that Joost was going to take a lot longer to reach a big audience than Skype, partly because of the need to reach complex deals with media owners. And when I asked when he expected to turn a profit, he made it clear that was so far off it wasn't worth talking about now.

Once you download the Joost software, you do get access to an awful lot of television for nothing. But it's difficult to get very excited about what is on offer - whether it's old movies or the "Motors & Babes" channel - and indeed there are complaints on the discussion forum about the poor content.

Zennstrom insists that Joost does not need blockbuster programming, like the Premier League football on which BskyB built its business. He believes this global platform can prosper by serving viewers with all sorts of special interests, from fly-fishing enthusiasts to gadget fans. What's not clear to me is why a large audience will go to the bother of installing software without the lure of something they can't get anywhere else.

2007 was supposed to be the year that internet television took off, with the launch of a whole clutch of services with wacky names and big ambitions. But two things have happened - the viewers have been slower to take to online TV than expected, and the big established broadcasters have launched their own platforms, keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry which handed the digital initiative to Apple's iTunes service.

Still, the Swedish serial entrepreneur has a track record of producing services that people want to use and tell their friends about, so maybe Joost will take off. Niklas Zennstrom is sensitive about suggestions that he is better at innovation than commercialisation - he insists that Skype is now profitable, despite Ebay's $1.4 billion write-down of the business it bought in 2005. But he may have to prove that his internet television operation can make money before moving on to his next world-changing venture.