Skype founders' peer-to-peer video service ready for public beta

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 17 December 2006 13:06

Your IT - Home IT

Interviewed by blogger, Om Malik, Friis described The Venice Project as "a streaming P2P platform for television." He claimed it would be "good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers...Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that. He claimed the service would deliver "near television quality" and would require around 1Mbps of bandwidth.

In a progress report emailed on 17 December, de Wahl, said: "We've come out of a long testing period that has resulted in us delivering a client that we hope you will want to use and share with your friends...There's plenty to be excited about and I am pleased to say that we've now started to send out the first invitations to those who have requested access to the beta...Among the latest features that we've incorporated are 'seek' for better content surfing, improvements to the installer, an elegant UI and many other enhancements that improve functionality all around.

A  posting on the project's web site on 23 November said: "We hired our first developers on January 1st - and now, 10 months later - we're ready to show the world our baby. Or at least a small part of it; most of the work will remain hidden on our servers, transcoding chains, and other backend systems. It has been a fun ride - people from 20 or so countries descending on Leiden, and it was nothing short of amazing to see developers, both from Open Source communities such as Ubuntu, Apache, Mozilla or Subversion and from industry, hit the floor running, collaborating, re-using enormous amounts of Open Source code in large chunks and rarely stumbling."

The poster indicated that the project would be supported by a global network of servers " As we're still rolling out servers across the globe, as not all fibre has been lit - we will contain things a bit - so expect us to run in an invitation style mode (where each beta tester gets some invites to give away; letting us grow exponentially yet controlled) for a little longer."

De Wahl said: "The reason we are holding back somewhat with these invitations is logistics. The fibre to Leiden [the development centre in Holland] is capped and our primary data centre is not online yet. Which means that we'll continue to add people until we've hit capacity, and then continue with additional batches as the ordered bandwidth becomes available.