We're finally there. This morning we've completed the last version of the software prior to sending out the 'big beta' - which marks the start of getting thousands and thousands of people on the platform in an invitation style manner. While we're still in the beta phase, we feel like we now have a strong proof of concept as we continue to build and enhance the platform. Since the last release, we've made some significant changes which include:

• Seek! (Well, the first half; so you can only seek within content you've played at least once. We'll improve that to full seek soon, but unfortunately that will require us to re-process all content - so it may take some time.)
• Improvements in the installer; especially around the settings
• We think we've finally fixed a nasty UI freeze in the EPG (and we'd love to hear about any freezes you find!)
• We've added paging when the information does not fit in the information boxes.
• You can now drag the window round when in desktop mode
• The top icon nicely highlights
• Lots of UI improvements, specifically in the channel catalog.
• More tooltips
• Improvements to the font-rendering

So next step will be to extend beta test invitations to a much larger group, by providing our current beta testers with tokens to invite others to participate. The reason we are holding back somewhat with these invitations is logistics. The fiber to Leiden is capped and our primary datacenter is not online yet. Which means that we'll continue to add people until we've hit capacity, and then continue with additional batches as the ordered bandwidth becomes available. By the way - if you've not yet done so, now is a good time to get on the list for the beta. Over the next weeks and months we expect to have invited everyone on that list - and we'll switch to invitations from thereon.

And we have lift off...

Finally - we're done. Well, Ok, the first beta version of the TVP client is fully cooked. We had a bit of a last minute frenzy to get the UI shipshape - but all is well now.

The next months will bring successive releases with more robust streaming, a video decoder which stutters a lot less, way, way more content, increased interactivity and a whole range of other features, tweaks and improvements (and a few nice surprises).

However we are not going to wait for that. While we're still very much in the beta phase, we have a strong proof of concept now. The main point of this release is to get the tires kicked by many thousands of people; rapidly climbing to much higher numbers (we'll be giving out invitation tokens) until we have gotten all our servers, fibers and datacenters fully on line around the globe.

So welcome to our beta- have fun!

Fredrik de Wahl, CEO - The Venice Project

One of the main things holding us back right now is the dependency on a tiny 50Mbit fiber to the Leiden office (which is also not exactly redundant). In order to solve this - we're planning on using a datacenter in Luxembourg as our effective 'headend' from where we broadcast into the peer to peer network. And from thereon we may have 'repeaters' spread out globally to prop up the peer to peer network in specific markets or markets which have relatively thin connections or poor peering.

unpacking

packing

So after some serious unpacking (left), testing and packing (right) we are on our way to Luxembourg.

At 4am, a mere few hours before these pictures were taken, we found that a key piece of equipment was dead on arrival (yup, that was indeed the main router). Usually we can get those replaced in just a few hours - but unfortunately Luxembourg is too small a country to warrant its own depot - so we're now hoping that the replacement arrives early tomorrow. (Newsflash: Cisco came through - and a new shiny 7301 was waiting for us when we got to the colo - well ahead of time. Excelent!) This means that we should be up and running just before Christmas.

So on to the next phase! Where we are almost like normal TV - with a 'headend', broadcasting station or 'satellite uplink' like everyone else.

Dw

Many thanks to all the Venice beta testers for your input, raves and constructive criticism. It's all hugely valuable. All reports received before 1800 GMT today will get a t-shirt in the new year (limited run!), though after that we'd still love to hear from you and we hope you keep the reports coming.

We seem to have made an impression - we now have several piles of emails from people wanting to try out Venice. Please be patient - everyone will get a chance to try it out. In the meantime, we've taken the application form offline and will add the remaining applicants we've received to date and then start handing out more tokens to existing beta testers, as our capacity increases.

So, if you signed up already, you'll get access to the beta test in the near future. If you haven't signed up yet you'll have to go find somebody who has and ask them very nicely for an invite. Compliments of the Season!

After a month of hard work from many, several all-nighters, and with the release of beta 0.7.2, we are now serving users from our first and main production data-centre in Luxembourg City. Within only a few hours of flipping the switch and bringing on-line our new Long Tail Servers, we're already seeing it take over 75% of the long-tail traffic. We now have over 10 times the capacity we had just one week ago, and we'll be doubling and then tripling that in just the next 2 weeks, which is a great help to us as we ramp up the amount of invites going out.

To help us manage the beta release, along with controlling invitations, each release has a time limit on its certificate and 0.7.1's certificate is about to run out. That's why you'll get a message telling you you have to upgrade to 0.7.2. But we have put a number of updates into 0.7.2 as well; to support the new data centres, fixing a number of start up problems and letting you run the program on Vista (as administrator).

We had a few small hiccups along the way to Luxembourg, we even got lost in Brussels just trying to drive to there (we're spending the extra €5 a day for a GPS unit next time), but it's a huge deal for us to have our first site operational. It also means I can sleep a lot more soundly, knowing we are no longer hovering close to our limits on the Leiden bandwidth! As Dirk mentioned before, we had a router fail on us just before departing. After a very long day testing everything, connecting everything together and shipping a few dozen terabytes of test traffic, it was pretty gutting to have a router fail just before I was ready to leave and get some sleep. At first, I thought it was the console cable, but no - it was definitely the router. Although we had a backup-plan, it was an enormous relief that after contacting the Cisco Technical Advice Centre at 03:06, they had a replacement on the way to Luxembourg by only 05:30 (in fact, it was there before us!). We've had no problems with the replacement unit, and this is why we test equipment before putting it into production.

Although Luxembourg is our first and main site, others are scheduled to come on-line early next year, we want our network latency to you to be as low as possible, so that when you change channel it happens as quickly as we can make it. We're paying close attention to how things go now, as we'll be repeating the same design many times. We're also paying close attention to our usage statistics, to decide where best to place our sites.

Over the next month or so, I hope you'll forgive us any network blips. We're still working hard to get true resilience in place, but once done we want to have geographic, network and power resilience with carrier-grade availability, just like TV. Right now we have 25 Sun x2200's (some of which will be replaced with more powerful dual power-supply machines in the near future), spread across 4 power feeds, to serve content. Each server is connected to at least 2 different switches, we're using Cisco 3750's and all of our traffic is routed by a Cisco 7301. We'll be adding a second router shortly, but in the meantime we're using the switches very healthy routing capabilities to provide equipment resilience.

Athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh!