Stuart Corner
Sunday, 17 December 2006 14:06
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The Venice project, reported earlier this year to be a peer-to-peer video delivery service under development by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom is getting ready for a public beta.
In a posting on the
Project's website on 12 December, CEO Fredrik de Wahl, said: "We're finally there. This morning we've completed the last version of the software prior to sending out the 'big beta' - which marks the start of getting thousands and thousands of people on the platform in an invitation style manner. While we're still in the beta phase, we feel like we now have a strong proof of concept as we continue to build and enhance the platform....So next step will be to extend beta test invitations to a much larger group, by providing our current beta testers with tokens to invite others to participate."
While little has been said publicly about the project, there was much reporting of it,
including on iTWire, after BusinessWeek broke the story in July. According to the project's web site "In essence the various journalists got the story almost exactly right: 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."
BusinessWeek had been given a demonstration of the planned service and described it as "combining professionally produced TV and video with the interactive tools of the Web." It quoted Friis as saying he expected the service, then in very limited beta with about 100 users, to be generally available by year end.
BusinessWeek described the service as turning the PC into a TV screen but with many more capabilities. "Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels."
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