The Venice Project has privately launched with an invite only beta release. Early reports are not looking good with complaints of inconsistent video quality, a poor GUI, and lack of textual descriptions to aid navigation.
The Venice Project is a TV distribution project that comes from Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype and Kazaa and so unsurprisingly uses peer to peer technology. Using P2P technology and the power of the web the creators hope to change the way TV is viewed on the internet by offering more channels, interactivity and a social aspect. Analysts say it could threaten existing TV networks. From what I’ve read it is more of a sophisticated p2p YouTube (video on demand) rather than something that will deliver live TV.
The minimum requirements to run The Venice project
- Pentium 4 processor, 1GHz
- 512Mb or more RAM.
- A modern video card with DirectX support and at least 32Mb of VRAM.
- About 500 MB free disk space; 45MB on disk, the rest cache.
- Broadband/ADSL – 1Mbit/s downstream, 512Kbit/s upstream recommended
From what I’ve read it is more of a sophisticated p2p YouTube (video on demand) rather than something that will deliver live TV
Zennstrom says:
“We’re trying to do the full TV experience by taking the good things from television and putting them together with the Internet and video sharing.”
Janus Friis said on his blog that:
“We’re fixing TV, removing artificial limits such as the number of channels that your cable or the airwaves can carry, and then bringing it into the Internet age, adding community features, interactivity, etc.”
With regards to the private beta release Friss also said:
“We set out to try to merge the best of TV and the best of the Internet and I think we have just taken a big step on a long journey. For a few months we have been quietly testing with a small circle of people. Now, we’re going to expand that circle – with more and more people getting invited. If you want to take it for a spin, get an invitation from an existing beta tester.”
The future of The Venice Project
From the small amount of screenshots that I have seen posted around the internet the Venice Project looks to have a media center look making it feel like a Windows Media Center or TiVo, but just not as good. However, this sort of GUI could open the project up to use on DVRs should it become successful.
Unlike Kazaa the Venice Project will be a rights protected service that intends to work with content producers rather than against them. In other words don’t expect pirated content.
The fact that the Venice Project wants to work with rights holders is probably a huge challenge in itself because TV networks, content producers and cable companies are very comfortable with their current model and do not like to change things. Just look how slow they are at adapting to the internet.
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