The Venice Project - First impressions

I’m fortunate enough to be one of the first beta testers for The Venice Project (TVP) - a new TVIP service developed by Skype founders and others. The official description goes:

We’re working on a project that combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

Apparently we are now cleared to blog (with the exception of content screenshots for now) - I am slightly wary of the fat NDA I clicked, so I won’t delve into too much detail, though if I don’t disappear I’ll add a more in-depth review. So far I’m impressed - and I have to admit to being quite (well if I’m honest….very) cynical about watching TV shows on the computer…. the 3 minute attention span target of Youtubeis about right for me and any time I see the Youtube show length indicator hit 30 minutes, something similar to disgust washes through me. I am an advocate of the lean-forward vs lean-back school of thought when it comes to device use and can rarely sit watching a device with as many buttons as a keyboard without needing to press something or find a suitable tangent to explore.

So… why is this any different? Well the first thing that you notice is that it runs fullscreen by default without asking. Quite a statement that The Venice Project doesn’t want to share yout desktop with anyone else (this can be changed though) . Starting off with a nice, TV-esque loading ident, its followed by an introduction detailing the latest content to be added to the service, and subsequently the automatic loading of a piece of this new content. The quality of the video does vary, but on the whole it is very good, with pixellation only really noticable at high resolutions. Given that there is only a delay of 5 seconds or so to kick off video, this is not bad at all.

The interface is simple and efffective, offering a number of different channels by default through the “My Channels” option, more of which can be added from the Channel Catalogue. The content at the moment is quite random (Paris Hilton, animal shows, music videos, worlds strongest man…) but that isn’t really the point. Things start getting MUCH more interesting in the “My Venice” area, where you start seeing the direction that they are heading, and how they are able to differentiate their offering from competitors. A number of plugins are available that encourage communication with those watching the channel at the same time, or just other friends that happen to be online (via your Jabber or Google Talk account) to encourage the sociability and shared experience of watching TV. This is apparently where they will be encouraging developers to do/make interesting things in the future.

Overall this is definitely one to watch - its refreshing how different it is to other IPTV offerings that are sanctioned by the content owners (and I’m sure that they’ve paid attention to the more illicit competitors such as Democracy). With this, you feel much more in control and it really seems to be working to the strengths of the medium rather than trying to bend online into a TV-shaped box. Ultimately all platforms are made or die from their content, and provided I can do more than watch Geoff Capes and cheetahs, this could go far.

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