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If the track record of Skype and Kazaa founders is any indication, then the burgeoning online video industry will need to gird for its latest contender. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom aim to do for online video what their earlier work has done for telecommunications and file sharing.Joost, the official name of the new online video service previously code-named “The Venice Project”, aims to be nothing less than a global television distribution platform, they say.(About the name, Friis explains on his blog:  ”While it does not mean anything now we think it will come to mean great quality Internet TV the way it should be.”)Swedish-born Chief Executive Fredrik de Wahl, a long-time colleague of Friis and Zennstrom, has already lined up a number of leading content providers (Warner Music, Endemol, September films and Indy Racing League) and advertisers (T-Mobile, Wm. Wrigley Jr., Maybelline).The trick now is to ensure the site’s technology and relationships with advertisers can stand up to the heat of going live in a market already crowded with video aggregators, including Google’s YouTube. Click here to read the Reuters coverage.de Wahl speaks with Reuters reporter Gavin Haycock:  Reuters: What is the breadth of the video, TV and movie offering. de Wahl: “Right now, we are in the beta test phase. We have a content offering that matches the test phase, which is sorting out bugs, quirks technology wise, testing the scalability of the solution. We have about 10,000 or so viewers on the platform that have been invited so far and that is not enough to put up top-tier programming. That said we have the categories of music, comedy, sport and documentaries …” Reuters: What is the technology involved?de Wahl: “The key is that we are replicating the TV experience. We are not having a techie interface with like a search interface and fine storage and all of these things that you are used to when see TV online or clips online that exist in other offerings today. It is all about consuming media. So when you start your application you instantly start to see a full-screen broadcast quality or a better quality TV experience streaming to your TV. So switching on the application switches on the TV. That is the experience we are replicating, it is not about storing a file or something like that …” Reuters: Could I, sitting in London, flick through all the top-name TV channels I can think of?de Wahl: ”Yes, that is exactly what we are talking about here, provided the content providers put up the content on the platform. We will not just take content … and make it happen. This is an only-authorised content platform. This means content owners will always be in control of what ends up in the platform.” Reuters: How many people are signed up to the beta test? de Wahl: “Quite a lot actually. I think we are talking about 50-60,000 people. After today, I can envisage that being quite a higher number. We have invited about 30,000 people and out of those we have about 50 percent of them  – Mac users – but they are waiting until we have a Mac version so that is why we have about 10,000-plus people on the platform. Reuters: Will the launch be in the U.S or Europe? de Wahl: “We are a true global platform. We don’t see ourselves as locked into one region. I mean it is global availability, and the only restrictions may be if content owners just want the content in some regions. Perhaps a content owner has restrictions … inside or outside of the U.S.”Reuters: How do you expect Joost to be different?de Wahl: “What we fundamentally have done differently to anyone else I have seen so far is we take a completely fresh approach to this and create a business model for all of the three key stakeholders. It is key that all of these three market players can co-exist. Any other efforts I have seen so far cater to one or two of them. The viewer needs a good experience, they need to be entertained, there needs to be full-screen experience, but also you need to be able to grow into the TV-like sized audiences which we can do through our delivery mechanism.” (Photo: Joost screenshot from Joost)