Venice project to complete the Video on Demand zigsaw ??

It has been several weeks since Venice project announced their resitricted beta-release testing, and i still haven't got any invitation yet (should've begged somebody in some mailing-lists or forums).

Feedbacks have been quite positive, some even released very tempting screenshot of the project. As much as its creators try to hide details, beta-testers could not help but sharing their experiences to the world. Few screenshots could be found here.

So on what ground that people believe that The Venice Project to be the next best thing ? It's all about Video on Demand. VoD, which is essentially a services that allow users to watch their favourite videos, be it movies/music clip ..., any time, on-demand. This concept has been around for years, and attracted a lot of academic research to improve user-perceived Quality-of-Service. Only recently do people see it come to reality, with the luxury of broadband connection.

Just to be more precise, there are two types of VoD services:
* One is to make the video files available for download, so that user could download the entire content to his PC and watch it anytime, anywhere. This is very convenient, if user have enough space in their hard drive (which seems trivial nowadays), and if he is willing to wait until the download complete. Traditionaly, this service is provided in a client-server model with the content provider host a server to serve all download. The next improvement is to use Content Distribution Network (CDN) such as Akamai, which make uses of third-party facility to boost user's sastifaction, in the expense of increased cost. Recently, with the help of P2P techonolgy such as Bittorrent, P2P-aware protocol such as Magnet-link, the download time could be significantly shortened. Zudeo, service from Azuerus, does exactly that. Being so promising, Zudeo has been chosen by BBC to broadcast their comedy shows (Little Britain ...).
With traditional client-server model, it seems seasy to enforce a payment system so that user must pay to get access to the content. However, with P2P model, it's still very unclear to me how the content provider is going to do about that, as more people downloading means better performance.

* Second type of VoD, which is quite ideal, is streaming Video on Demand. User can watch content in real-time, but via streaming. Benefits are that he doesn't need to wait until the download complete, and does not need a lot of space to store the entire video. It's believed to be extremely useful in the future, where users moving from laptop, PC to mobile phone and PDA, which apprantly do not offer as much space. Of course, if user can view the stream, he should be able to save it as well (just like download). However, there are many challenges. As the nature of streaming is a real-time service, timely delivery is crucial. Any delay results in significant degradation of quality, and user would likely give up. As contrast to download VoD, this timing matter does not affect user satisfaction very much, as long as the final file is in good quality.
There is one variation of streaming VoD, which is live streaming. To many suprise, live streaming systems seem more easy to implement than tradition VoD. This is due to the fact that while watching live content, one must be synchronized with others' view, many users are watching the same content, which turns out to be ideal environment for P2P model. Many real-life systems have been implemented and widely used, with incredible user's satisfaction.

On the other hand, user in traditional VoD network do not synchronize his view with other. In fact, one should even be possible to fast forward or seek back the content, anywhere he wants. As this streaming model is asynchronous, traditional client-server, even with the help of CDN network, would not survive against large number of users (especially in flash-crowd even, where a new content suddendly attract enormous attention from many users). That desires for a P2P model, which seems to be the mission for The Venice Project to fullfil. There have been many proposed models, many researches toward a robust, scalable, cost-effective P2P streaming VoD system, but none has been widely deployed. Benefit from this model is two-fold. First, content provider is relieved from the bandwidth burden, especially if the content is not very popular so that many users pay for it. Second, user would experience higher quality of service, even in a flash-crowd event.

From the screenshots and recent comments, The Venice Project will be offering video in High-Definition quality. That is the way to go. High expectation from the creators of Skype to deliever the next best thing on the Internet. As Skype breaks the traditional telecommunication way of communicating, The Venice Project will again break the traditional television-way of watching video ??