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Well I received a long awaited invite to the beta program for The Venice Project, the latest video start-up powered by the guys who brought us Skype and Kazaa along with a plentiful dose of P2P technology. The program installs easily with minimal prompting required, GigaOM has posted screenshots and a breakdown of the service, it seems he is about the only one who is going against the clearly stated policy on not posting screenshots!

The beta test program has a forum set up for the user group although the development team are understandably being quite coy at the moment about divulging too much information on the technology behind the application. The program uses a few open source technologies behind it of which there is a list here, aside from this there is not much information available at the moment. The application will in an hour download about 320mb of data and being P2P will upload as well on what seems thus far to be a rough ratio of 3:1 so for those with bandwidth limitations and other nasties this could potentially be an issue.

 In terms of where it stands in the market place its quite difficult to place, there is mention on the forums of in browser viewing and links in future versions, and there are mentions by bloggers and beta testers of placing it in the YouTube catagory. Personally I’d prefer it kept to mainstream content supported as it is at the moment by advertising which would maintain a certain quality of content which in all fairness does not exist on YouTube. The advertising can apparently be localised which of course puts it in an amazing position ahead of traditional television channels as well as better interactive capabilities off of this.

What would be great to see would be a version for the Nintendo Wii (or similar) console, the modern consoles are well equipped in theory it would seem (I’m not a developer so say this without full knowledge of the practicalities), to handle a platform such as this and would allow the venice project user to go back to the armchair. Video content isn’t generally interactive and is very much a lean back not lean forward sort of media so potentially a good thing. Have to wait and see what happens, a Mac version is on its way and there are promises of a linux version at which point it could in theory run on the PS3.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 3:04 am and is filed under IPTV, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.