We've been asked a lot about how The Venice Project™ uses bandwidth, following articles at out-law.com and elsewhere based on the documents provided to our beta testers. We thought it was worthwhile explaining a bit more about what we've been doing here and how it compares to other forms of online video-based entertainment.

Full-screen video of any kind inevitably use a lot of bandwidth, and The Venice Project™ is no exception to this. The software downloads about 320MB per hour (as a maximum) and uploads up to 105 MB per hour. The more popular the content is on our platform, the more sources it can be pulled from and the less redundant data we send; that number can be as low as 220MB per hour of viewing. We've made what we think is a reasonable trade-off between the quality of the picture and the bandwidth usage, but this is full-screen TV-quality video - so there are limits on how low we can keep bandwidth usage while delivering good picture quality.

Because we're aiming for a TV-like experience with continuous streaming video and the ability to flip channels, we're in a somewhat different situation to other systems, which are usually about downloading specific pieces of content and then watching them. But to provide some degree of comparison: a digital television feed from a satellite uses something between 14 and 70GB per hour; compressed digital television works out at between 900MB and 3GB an hour viewed, and DVD is of the same order. A TV episode downloaded through a file-sharing network will usually set you back about 350MB for a 45 minute episode in reasonable full screen quality. Video pay-per-view downloads will usually set you back around 400 MB/hour for television quality full-screen to 3GB/hour for high definition movie trailers.

Most people have high-speed connections without restrictions and can more than handle this bandwidth demand, but some ISPs (especially in the UK) cap bandwidth access, so we suggest that you take a look at your provider's bandwidth policy before using The Venice Project™ for any lengthy period of time.

Still enjoying myself a lot here at The Venice Project. It's been ten months already, which flew past. Over this period we've already come a long way; if you're on the beta program you know what I am talking about.

To give you an idea what the project is all about, we have a phone interview available with Janus Friis, one of our founders (around 3 minutes, 2.4 MB, QuickTime .mov).

I could continue talking about the project, but some video footage is more appropiate for a project like ours. And pictures say more than a 1000 words, so it saves some typing

To start with we have a video of Dirk-Willem van Gulik, our CTO. And one featuring Henrik Werdelin, in charge of Product. Dirk explains how the project actually works, while Henrik will be talking about cool features we'll be introducing, and about some the content to expect on the platform. Oh, and there is some footage of me too, so you can put a face and a voice to this...

This should give you an idea of what goes on behind the scenes; a looking glass inside the company if you will (each 3 minutes, around 11 MB, QuickTime .mov).

After working quite hard for the last several days, we just took our new Joost™ website live - welcome!

Thanks to the whole team!

Today is a big day for us. Today we've parted ways with our "codename" and will forever more be known by our real name... Joost™!

There was a lot of speculation about why we were called The Venice Project™ in the first place. The truth is admittedly slightly less intriguing than the mystery. The "Venice" of The Venice Project™, is not that of gondolas and canals. It's not Venice Beach, California. It's not even related to the movie. Our "Venice" was simply the name of the hotel conference room where we first decided to start this venture, the initial idea that is now Joost™. At that point we really just needed a name.

Getting to this point has been a huge effort. Our engineers, and the rest of our team have worked day and night - and while exhausted, I think we're all pretty excited about how far we've come from that initial concept... to this branded release. We're still in beta - but we're at a point where we have a great proof of concept - and a platform that we'll continue to build and enhance - with the continued support of our beta testers and our partners.

On a final note - I've got to say - please keep the feedback coming. Beta tester feedback has been hugely valuable (even when it's critical... actually especially when it's critical).

Enjoy the 0.7.3

Cheers,
Fredrik

Hi, everyone. Yesterday was a big day for us – we went from a relatively secretive stealth-mode to Joost™, and it's great to finally be able to tell everyone about what we are up to: merging the best of TV with the best of the Web.

Without going into a long and emotional Academy Award® winner type speech, I'd like to thank everyone for the kind emails and calls we got yesterday. We received around 100,000 questions, thumbs up, beta requests, and business proposals within the last 24 hours and they are all very much appreciated. We look forward to getting back to everyone as soon as possible, but if you don't get an immediate response please bear with us as there are many more of you than there are of us! In the meantime, please visit the FAQ as it already addresses a lot of the questions we've been getting.

Once again, many thanks for watching,

Henrik