REVIEW: The Venice Project 09 January 2007

Update: The Venice Project is now Joost.

From the founders of Skype, comes a brand new toy; The Venice Project. A computer application and system for distributing high quality TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer technology. I was lucky enough to nab one of the first few public beta accounts, and have had a happy time playing with the system this afternoon.

Early impressions? Well this is not a half-baked release like the “proof of concept” release of SongBird, although this uses a lot of the same technology behind it, (Apache Cocoon, Dojo, Jena, Mozilla, RDF, SVG, XML, XUL), this is a very, very nice looking program with some thought behind it.

Like OS X, the user interface looks like it was designed with the end user in mind, and it is pretty quick to pick up. As Paul Stamatiou said, the various buttons on the main controller have a similar feel as Apple’s Front Row application. All the menus slide on-screen or fade into place, which is rather pleasing to the eye, although both my laptop and my tower PC were grumbling somewhat. Currently there is only a release for Windows XP, although the Venice Project official blog states that they are “working hard on a native Macintosh Intel version and expect it to be available in the next few months”. Linux users will get a version too.

Currently there is a rather meagre selection of things to watch, although highlights from Fifth Gear was rather nice a surprise. The program does not require users to download any files to their computers, unlike some of the other computer based television systems, and uses secure peer-to-peer technology to stream programmes to your computer. However, this is not just some sort of fount-end for YouTube, the idea behind Venice, is to have high quality programs from established broadcasters, (think BBC, Fox). Although there is some good stuff on YouTube, it is either illegally uploaded, or so bogged down within the crap that you’ll hardly ever find it. The strength of Venice is that there is no way of saving shows locally.

“The Venice Project, allows you to watch any show on the system at any time, so there is no need to worry about saving the content locally. If you want to watch it again, you can just do so right away. This on-demand feature is a key part of The Venice Project’s design, and it’s also part of our strategy for ensuring that programmes don’t get illegally copied and redistributed.”

The quality of the full screen video isn’t bad either, its better than iPod quality, but not as good as DVD. That said, the more users, and the better supported the system is, I would only expect increases in the quality and speed of the video content. Other features include the ability to run additional plugins, (what else when Mozilla is in there?), within Venice, including News Tickers, (which I couldn’t get to work), clocks, chat with other viewers watching at the same time you are, and Instant Messaging to users on the Jabber system, (that includes GoogleTalk folks!)

There are currently bandwidth issues to consider; “In one hour of viewing, approximately 320Mb data will be downloaded and 105Mb uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1Gb cap in 10 hours.” So if you have an upper limit on your monthly internet usage, or you pay for internet usage as you go (i.e. you pay per megabyte you download, instead of a flat fee), you could run into problems.

The Venice Project looks like one of the most fundamental changes to how video could be watched from now on, looking ahead to the possibilities that the new AppleTV project, 2007 is going to be interesting times. I have been told that you can still sign up as a beta tester.