Agylen

And in the end the mystery was revealed. The super-secret project a bunch of people have been working on for the last months, sometimes obliquely hinting at it in mails and blog posts (here, here and here for example), finally came out of stealth mode and opened its public website.

But what it’s all about? Well, nothing more and nothing less than bringing television to the internet using P2P technology, coming from the same people who started Kazaa and then Skype. A very ambitious project, but given the success history of its founders and the amount of brainpower they managed to collect under their umbrella, success is a very probable outcome.

I am amazed at the amount of work that has been accomplished in less than six months. What we have now is a product that—while still of alpha quality and that will be initially delivered to a very restricted set of tech-savvy users, before going to a public beta and then to general availability—is already very promising.

The defining characteristics of The Venice Project are:

• P2P technology to stream videos without having to wait for download to complete.
• High-quality content from mainstream providers, not lots of crappy homemade videos like you can find on YouTube.
• Later on, user-generated content also, but always with an eye towards quality.
• Social aspects like reviews, ratings, IM, tagging, and other similar stuff.

Working on this project, for me, has been at times a blast and at times stressful, like every highly innovative project with tight deadlines is. But this is the kind of stress that we are well accustomed with. What’s been really great has been working together with a number of incredibly smart people, from whom I’ve learned a number of things and hope to continue learning.

There is a small problem with the product, though: there isn’t yet a Mac version, so in order to use it at home, I’ve been forced to install Windows XP on top of BootCamp. I’ve been told that a Mac version is in the works and will follow on the heels of the Windows version, but I can happily report that the Windows beta works perfectly on BootCamp A Linux version is also very probable.

Technorati Tags: television, iptv, the venice project, p2p.