Joost Blog

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