the venice project

Courtesy of Daniel, I got a betatest account for The Venice Project, the latest project from the folks who gave us Kazaa and then Skype. This is their attempt to do to TV what Skype does to phone calls.

So what is it? It's a peer-to-peer system for distributing full quality on demand streaming television over the internet.

The UI is a little awkward at first (it's an overlay over the video) but once you get used to it, it's nice and clean.

The content is organised into channels. At the moment, they're obviously still putting together content deals, so it's not an awesome range. I can see problems in the future with the "one big list of channels" approach once they get enough content into the system. There's a 'Search' option that still needs a fair bit of help.

The video quality is remarkable. I've noticed a few times where the audio/video starts stalling and glitching, but given I'm watching fullscreen TV quality, that's still not too bad at all. Whacking pause/play seems to make it better.

There's a few things I've noticed that are Not Quite Right - the most annoying is that it seems to disable the external video port on my laptop while it's running. I'd much, much rather watch the video on the external LCD than the laptop's own display. I've logged a bug against this, hopefully it's something they'll fix.

One huge caveat is the bandwidth requirements. The website quotes 220-320 megabytes per hour downstream, and 100 or so upstream. That pretty much means you need at least a 1Mbit connection (I have a 1.5Mbit connection). People on a 256k DSL link are probably going to have a non-useful experience. If you're on a bandwidth capped link, I could see this chewing through your cap in very short order. For people in Australia who are unfortunate enough to get excess billing charges, this could be very very scary. The application minimises itself to the system tray when you close it rather than quitting, so unless you want to cause yourself enormous pain, make sure you close it properly, or uncheck the "use standby mode" checkbox in the preferences screen.

As far as content - there's a pile of music-related things, documentaries, and various other bits and pieces. I'd fully expect this to grow rapidly.
(Aside: one of the channels is Fifth Gear. I'd heard of this as a knock-off of the BBC's Top Gear, but never watched it before. Wow. It's like Top Gear with the humour and sense of fun sliced out.)

Important Note: I do not have any spare beta invites to give away. Please don't bother asking me for them in comments.
(I only mention this because every other blog post I've seen on TVP gets countless numbers of people saying "pls send me invite kthxbye")