The secret "Venice Project" is slowly moving towards fruition. Joost, which has been in private Beta, will become available for Mac and PC users this summer and everything will change according to Time Magazine on Thursday.

Joost will be a huge revolution in the now fragmented world of Internet and broadcast TV. Microsoft and others (like MovieLink) have failed. Now Joost will bring TV, blessed by the studios and easy to use, to your desktop. Jeremy Caplan explained. "...unlike Apple TV, Slingbox and other hardware offerings, Joost requires nothing more than software.... You’ll download the free Joost software, then use it to watch channels ranging from Lime, a lifestyle station, to National Geographic. And potentially thousands more, from anywhere, in real time — and without the stuttervision that dogs streaming video today."

Joost will succeed where other have failed because it uses a proven business model combined with minimalism. "Unlike YouTube, Joost has no user-generated content. Instead of video clips of rapping grandmas, crashing skateboarders and blathering strangers, Joost focuses on network-quality programs. And unlike Apple’s iTunes, which sells TV shows and movies, Joost is free, though its content is peppered with one to three minutes of ads an hour. It’s a 50-year-old broadcast model updated," Mr. Caplan reported.

Others, who’ve had an early look, approve. "Joost could make YouTube, Google Video and Apple TV look like 1988," gushes tech-blog UtahSaint.

Even better, Joost provides the Holy Grail of Internet TV: quantifiable metrics. Ad executives will love Joost because it can tell advertisers exactly what people are interested in, in real-time. And they also love the strong encryption of the video stream.

Encryption, however, wasn’t the tough problem. The tough part turned out to be how to deliver stutter-free video on demand to millions of customers. Finally, the technical breakthrough came last summer, and the founders Janus Friis, 30, and Niklas Zennstrom, 40 who sold Skype for US$2.6B realized they were on their way.

Why aren’t they on the beach? "I do ask myself sometimes," Mr. Friss said, "why I’m not sitting on some island on the beach relaxing. When this works, though, it’ll all be worth the work."