The Next Big Thing: Social Video?

If you’ve ever used Skype, you know that part of its allure is that it is simple to use and it just works. Maybe that’s why there’s so much buzz building around the next moves from Skype (and Kazaa) developers Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, first the Venice Project and now something called Kyte.TV. Can these guys work the same Skype magic in the video arena? And is the opportunity just as big, or bigger?

While there are still some questions to be answered as to how the Venice Project is going to seed itself with content, the interest in our beta-look post over at GigaOM is at least starting proof that the desire to break away from cable and broadcast programming models is strong. (If you want to get a taste yourself, there is still time to enter our beta-view contest.)

And today over on GigaOM, Katie discovers Kyte.TV, an effort to bring easier video-sharing to a lot of platforms, including mobile phones. The Skype DNA is well represented there, with Niklas and some of Skype’s VC backers, including Howard Hartenbaum at Draper Richards, backing Decentral.tv, the parent of the Kyte project. All still early days, but given the DNA of both projects, it’s certainly stuff we’re going to stay tuned to.