Venice, first look

Yesterday, one guy in a P2P mailing list was kind enough to agree to send me an invitation to the Vennice project beta-release. Have been in their (TVP) waiting list for several weeks and patience has run out, as people keep releasing blogs about their expeirence with TVP.

This morning, checking work email, got invitation from the kind fellow and started installing and playing around with it. Hours later, checking Gmail, found out that TVP has just sent me another invitation (turned out that i had moved to the top of the waiting list). Talk about irony !!

Anyway, playing around with The Venice Project is really such a great experience. These guys really know how to make a simple, yet professional and attractive user interface. Quality of the contetn is also good (around Rmvb quality), even though not very diverse at the moment. Most of them are cheap music or discovery type of videos.

About speed, it takes normally about 3-5 seconds to start watching (after clicking on the channel). It makes me think of Skype, which also take about that much to log-in and about 2-4 seconds to start chatting (voice) with friends. Don't know how this will change in prototion to network condition. This morning, my network is pretty fast (no one else was leeching it), so this speed is within expectation. Will test it this evening where the network will be crippled down signifcantly. So far, so good.
On the other hand, this high quality of service also comes at the expense of costly bandwith. Officially, TVP tells user that watching a one-hour video would cost them about 300MB for downloading and 200MB for uploading. This non bandwidth-friendly feature would present as one of the biggest obstacle for large-scale deployment of TVP. As the moment, most ISPs are well aware of Bittorrent as a bandwidth sucking monster and try to limit users from using such protocol, by charging more money, moving away from unlimited bandwidth offers. TVP would be the next victim. For home user, they are willing to pay extra money for better, on-demand entertainment. Students (living in University accomodation), however, could not be very thrilled with the prespective, as they have to live with strict bandwidth usage regulation , and just don't want their Internet connection cut off.

Still don't know how long before TVP give me some token/invitation so i could invite some more friends to play with it.