From the May 14, 2007 issue of NEWSWEEK - Disruption isn't what it used to be. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis are known for marching into an industry and turning its business model into chopped meat. They made deadbeats of the music business with tune-sharing Kazaa and rendered telcos speechless with call-for-free Skype. Then a funny thing happened. After selling Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion, the pair paid more than $100 million to the record labels for Kazaa reparations. "That litigation meant we have a huge amount of understanding for [a big industry's] issues," says Friis, a 30-year-old Dane. This set the stage for a different approach in their next venture—a kinder, gentler sort of disruption.

The current target? Television. Their new project is Joost (pronounced like "juiced"), and the point is "to change the way people consume TV," says Swedish native Zennström, 41. This time around, it's more lovefest than war. Joost wants to be safe as milk for studios, an ace sales tool for advertisers and a permanent addiction for anyone with a broadband connection. Let YouTube fight off Viacom in a copyright lawsuit; Joost has signed Viacom as a content partner.

Load the free service, which went public last week, and your screen fills with video, essentially making your computer into a TV. It's not DVD quality, but it's watchable. The reason it looks better than similar ventures is that, like Kazaa and Skype, it makes the most of peer-to-peer technology, a fast and economical way to distribute bits. Everything on Joost is on-demand: no worrying about schedules. Since it's on the Internet, Joost has interactive features like chatting with friends while watching.

But the key to Joost's future is programming, and that's where the founders' newfound respectability is making a difference. The 100-plus channels that Joost carries include the mundane (MTV's "Laguna Beach"), the retro (The Lassie Channel), the brutal (Fight Network) and the cutting edge (Indie Flix). And better stuff is coming. New deals include the Turner Network (Adult Swim cartoons, CNN stalwarts like "Larry King Live") and Sony Pictures Television (library gems like "Charlie's Angels"). NEWSWEEK has also learned that Warner Brothers Television is the next bigfoot shoe to fall; WB president Bruce Rosenblum says he's starting a Joost science-fiction channel (with choices from "Babylon 5" to "My Favorite Martian") and a "Before They Were Megastars" channel (example: "Growing Pains" with a then unknown Brad Pitt).

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