The Venice Project (TVP) is the cool new project from Niklas and Janus, Skype bosses. Apparently many journalist don’t get what it is, so I will just quote one TVP employee:

… in a nutshell TVP is “TV over the internet” - streaming video on demand from a range of “real” content providers (just like you’d find on regular broadcast TV), using a secure P2P layer to reduce bandwidth costs and thereby allow us to provide higher-quality content. No more grainy quarter-screen lo-res clips like YouTube, and as it’s all legal and above board there’s no danger of a visit from plod for watching some forbidden content.
That’s not all, though - there will be a number of community features, a plugin API to allow third parties to add their own functionality to the client, and all sorts of bells and whistles to enhance your viewing experience. And best of all it’s all free (as in beer), supported by advertising. (And don’t worry - due to the way the platform works you should only see ads that are relevant to either you as an individual or to the content you’re watching; think Google context-sensitive ads, only on TV.)

Being a Skype employee, I got an invitation to the beta, so I gave it a try and installed the application tonight.

Installation was very fast, although on my machine I had to reboot to get it starting (it’s not a requirement, seems to be something on my PC). It starts immediately in full screen mode, which is in line of its ambitions of being a “better TV”. The interface is beautiful, and quite simple. There is a channel catalogue, from which you select the channels that will appear in your personal channel list (“My channels”). Currently you have to add a channel to your channel list to watch it, it’s not possible to preview it from the channel catalogue.

The video quality is good, especially since it’s running in full screen. The real test would be to plug it to a big HDTV however. But broadband is getting faster (at least in modern countries like France and Estonia..) so HDTV quality should also come.

You can add plugins to the application, like a chat application. The synergies with Skype are quite obvious too, we can guess that a Skype plugin will come.

Not a lot of content for now, but it’s still early. They are putting the technology in place to convince content providers that their precious programs will be secure.

GigaOM also has a look at it, with screenshots. There is an interesting comment why TVP has it chances:

“Unless the stuff available on Venice is as good as what’s available via major licit and illicit sources, who cares what the picture quality is like?”
It’s easier and quicker than downloading (and isn’t going to land you in court), more convenient than watching it when the broadcasters decide you’re going to watch it, and cheaper than a TiVo. The Venice Project isn’t just about the video, either - there are already a few community-type elements in there and more are planned for the near future, and we’re going to be able to add “value” that just isn’t available from the current TV/video solutions. (If it were just about “quality video”, do you think YouTube would have become as popular as it has?)

Overall it’s working very nicely for a early beta.

They have a blog, but apparently didn’t spend too much time on it yet: you cannot leave comments and Bloglines refuses to subscribe to it.

The TVP team seems to be quite an international one, with a few French people working from Toulouse. There is even a former classmate from my engineering school ESIEE working there, Jean-Baptiste Quenot. Small world.

Update: Jaanus Kase has a review too, much more complete than mine

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 1:39 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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