If IP service providers and carriers ever wanted a friend to drive more content through their dumb pipe they may have found it in Skype.
In what should start of a feeding frenzy between bandwidth carriers wanting to have more of the traffic that Skype will generate, today's announcement about a Voice and Content Marketplace being launched by Skype has huge implications. It also ratchets up the war by a few notches and begins to show how the war between Skype and Google makes companies like Yahoo, MSN and AOL look like their internal company structure and all the politics that go with it can stand in the way of delivering a community of consumers what they want.
The irony of this is I'm presenting somewhere today about this topic in and could not be happier about the announcement as it validates my theory of putting the intelligence at the endpoint (i.e. to be selective, and to do the work) while making the core be the engine or heart that the brain at the end controls.
Skype is showing more than being an IM with Voice client. It is clearly with this and a few other announcements now a clear threat to more than Yahoo, AOL, MSN and others. You can now include the cable operators and Viacom, NBC, ABC/Disney, FOX and others in the mix especially in the "radio" world. For that matter it means Qualcomm with their Media Flo platform would enjoy Skype in ways I bet they haven't even dreamed of yet.
