Skype founders and serial entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis do not seem to like twiddling their thumbs, as it appears that just as the fate of Skype is sealed with the Microsoft acquisition – they are on the verge of launching a new video service: Vdio.
Vdio has apparently been in stealth mode for the last two years until uncovered today by Janko Roettgers over at GigaOm. It comes from the same stable, and same naming convention, as Rdio – the on demand music streaming service and Spotify competitor that Zennstrom and Friis launched last summer.
Roettgers managed to find that Vdio was another offering from the Skype founders after spotting that the Vdio trademark was registered to the company behind Rdio, namely Pulser Music Services. Apparently the service has been going under the name of Project WBS since 2009, and managed to raise $5.6 million last October.
The most exciting part about Vdio so far, however, is the team behind it, including Justin Erenkrantz (ex-Apache Software Foundation and Joost), along with others from those two companies and others from Napster, TVguide, NBC, Skype, and even NASA. Most importantly, for the reasons of working out exactly what Vdio may offer – is a content manager from Netflix – which could maybe point at the services main target.
Also interesting, with Netflix and Hulu still not having launched in the UK, is that it appears that the UK is where Vdio is going to launch first – meaning that the market is pretty much open at the moment. If Zennstrom and Friis have learnt the lessons from their first foray into digital video, Joost, then this could be an exciting addition to the UK’s digital content line-up.
[via GigaOm]