Finally, almost - as you can see from the images below - we're almost, almost!, public. The secrecy is nearly gone - and we're even wearing our totally faux T-shirts in public. Well actually the pictures were taken in some dungeon deep under the canals of Leiden, The Netherlands.

So expect us to keep this blog up and running - and if you notice tags on photos, links on blogs or other pointers tagged 'theveniceproject' - you'll know it is us.

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.

For those who've not quite caught on to what Venice is all about - 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.

But we're also bringing something back from that old TV - of having a shared experience with your friends, something you can talk about, rally around and enjoy with others.

And it is that latter part - embodied in the community tools and APIs - which we expect will play a prominent role in this early beta. Since we're based on some widely distributed Open Source software we do expect people to quickly be able to leverage it and tune it to their own wild ideas, hobbies and interests.

Our earliest betatesters have just seen 0.6.2 - and that has really helped us weed out some of the bugs, and get it tested on a much wider range of machines. We'll soon release 0.7 - which has a lot of additional shine, more community tools, and a lot more nice content.

As we're still rolling out servers across the globe, as not all fiber 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.

So if you have not signed up - this is a good time, as we may just close signup on the day of release.

Dirk-Willem van Gulik / dirkx(a)theveniceproject.com

So, I was sitting yesterday in the office and watching the news on Channel 4 in the UK. Was positively surprised to see that they had a piece about our project where they tried to explain what we were all about. Normally they do a really good news report but this segment was really odd. EVERYTHING they said about The Venice Project was wrong. Not just a little bit wrong - but totally out in the woods. I wonder where they got their information. It was clearly not from us or our website - maybe they got us mixed up with someone else.

We are in the process of launching a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet. All content on The Venice platform is provided by content owners directly, and it's all protected with the highest standard of encryption using the most recent, up to date, federally approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (FIPS 197) and we are working within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) framework to ensure that it complies with appropriate content protection and ownership regulations.

Besides making a product that we trust users will love, we think that quality content and the respect of copyright is central to making The Venice Project successful. We cannot mix the best of the Internet with the qualities of TV without the content industry's help and support, which is why the service has been developed with this thought at the heart of our business.

Luckily, Channel 4 quickly realized their mistake and have now removed the clip from their site. They also said that we were about to dramatically change the way people watch TV - so at least they got something right