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

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

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!

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

Mac Intel users, rejoice! Joost for Mac Intel is now available in beta version. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. With the help of a handful of great people, we were able to leverage both the tremendous work done by the Client team for the Windows version as well as the cross-platform power of Mozilla. As a result, we have a Mac version that looks very much like Joost for Windows, while behaving very much like a Mac application.

Many thanks to our courageous alpha-testers who provided useful feedback and helped us squash the last few serious bugs. Still, let me remind you: it's a beta. There are a few bugs left (read the release notes). And please report any new bugs you find. We'll send t-shirts to the submitters of the best bug reports!

We're temporarily suspending the download of the Mac OS X client while we fix a rather severe problem in the platform specific section of the code. The Windows version is fine.

Apologies for this - but to some extent this is the inevitable result of being on the bleeding edge of a beta.

We'll probably have a new version for you later today.

And we're back! - we just put up version 0.8.0.1 to replace the broken 0.8.0 MacOSX build of this morning.

Apologies for this - but we had some teething problems with our MacOSX build chain. All part of the 'fun and games' called a beta.

You might have heard some rumours in the last few days that we were about to release a flood of invites for Joost. It's true that we are indeed scaling up for a much wider release... very soon, so keep an eye out here for updates over the next couple of weeks.

We're determined to make Joost a great experience for all of our viewers, and we want to make sure that we don't unleash it on the world before it's ready. Watch this space for a new version of the product, a new-look website and some great new content - it's all about to happen!

Good news - we had a few palettes of servers and routing gear arriving - and we are currently shipping these out to various Data centers in the US and Europe as part of our Long Tail Storage push.

Credits: Fotoset by colmmacc The first batch has gone off to Los Angeles (though unfortunately it took nearly a week before US customs cleared the last piece of kit) - and the next two batches should go out this week to two other locations.

We're reaching another big milestone this week. After months of testing with many thousands of users, we're ready to move Joost on to the next stage of its development.

In preparation for this we're closing down applications for the beta testing program on the website at the end of Thursday (GMT). Between this time and the public availability of Joost, access will be by invitation from beta testers only.

So this is last call to apply via the website!

The good news is, that everyone who applies before we close will get access to try out Joost within the next couple of weeks - how is that for a treat? :o)

As you can might imagine, this is a very exciting moment for us. A big thank you to everyone who has helped to bring us this far - and to the rest of you, we look forward to inviting you to try out Joost for yourself very soon.

At last, after several months of delays BT finally delivered a crucial fiber connection. It links our engineering and transcoding center in Leiden to the peer to peer broadcasting facility in Luxembourg. So this means we can start 'broadcasting' in earnest. And to make good news even better - we also got the much needed redundant connection from Luxembourg to Amsterdam as well.

Slowly but surely all the pieces of the puzzle are slotting together.

Hey everyone - today we are proud to present: Our brand new shiny website. Our web team and friends have been working night and day to give our online home a much needed makeover...and here it is. It's now much more in tune with our software and hopefully easier to use too. We really hope you like it as much as we do. Please also have a look in the "What's Joost" section where there is a cool new video explaining who we are. And of course, stay tuned for the upcoming new version of our software and loads of new channels.

The latest version of Joost is now available to our beta testers for download - and it's our biggest release yet.

We have also added a bunch of new content, so there's now more channels to choose from - including some from the biggest brands in entertainment.

To celebrate this we have given all beta testers fresh invitations to hand out! So if your friend is a beta tester, this would be a good time to ask for an invite ;o)

We have changed the login, registration and invitation systems for this release: now everything is happening in the client directly. So the first thing you must do when starting the new version, is to register and choose your own personal Joost name.

So for all you beta testers, you now get the chance to choose a cool Joost name before everybody else!

Enjoy!

This month we've been expanding our beta-testing community by many thousands of viewers. In increasing this number, and along the way doubling the number of concurrent users, we have proven the benefits of P2P by seeing the majority of traffic for popular content being delivered solely within the Joost P2P network. However, it has also shown that mixing P2P and traditional HTTP traffic provides its own unique set of problems. We were aware of the kinds of issues we would encounter and now we are getting the full P2P effect that we designed for we can work on improving the interaction with the other back-end services. This means that some viewers will get errors when trying to view some shows, which is regrettable, but it does have the positive benefit that knowing that now means that we can work on fixing it, which we are doing.

So please bear with us as we fine-tune the client to make the most of this new broadcasting platform. The bug reports and statistics we're getting from the beta-test deployment are incredibly useful to us as we optimise the system. And thanks again for helping us improve Joost.

I'm extremely pleased to tell you that America's most watched network will be available on the Joost platform when we launch this spring.

CBS has signed a deal with Joost to make top current and classic programming available for free, to our viewers. That means that you will soon have on-demand access to programs like CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, CBS Evening News, CBS Sportsline, Survivor and much more.

CBS is the first major network to sign on with Joost and joins our rapidly expanding list of emerging and established content partners. Click here for a complete list of programming available on Joost: http://www.joost.com/whatson/channels.html

Of course, all content will be available in full-screen, high-quality video and you'll be able to interact with other Joost users just as you can now. Being able to offer this kind of experience is why Joost was created.

This is an exciting time for television and Joost. Stay tuned...there is plenty more to come.

As described earlier by Dirk-Willem, we shipped a batch of machines to Los Angeles to setup a long tail storage cluster and a version of our website. After having the servers had spend a good week of quality time with the U.S. Customs, we managed to get them delivered to our data center and proceeded to set them up. When you now use the latest beta client and you are in the United States, it is very likely that you will be peering with one of these new servers. This will provide faster access to content to those who are not in Europe.

Credits: Pictures taken by Justin Erenkrantz.

Next up will be two more data centers around the world that will provide faster access to other parts of the world. As this one of our first roll outs it had its bumps, but overall it went pretty smoothly. I would like to thank the operations team and honory team member Justin Erenkrantz for making this all reality.

A few weeks ago one of our intrepid Operations staff made the long trip to London to build our newest LTS cluster.

With the exception of some interesting navigation around London's one way system, the build-out went very smoothly and we now have a high speed service for Europe.

Credit - colmmacc

The past week has been a busy and exciting one for Joost. Last week, we announced more than 30 top brands from around the world as advertising partners. Today, ads from some of these ad launch partners will begin to play on Joost.

We're also adding exciting new programming from five content owners - Turner Broadcasting System, Sony Pictures Television, Hasbro, the NHL and SI. Beginning later this week, you'll begin to see shows from these providers on Joost - shows like "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "The Transformers," "G.I. Joe," "Starsky & Hutch," "Charlie's Angels" and "NewsRadio." We'll also have video shorts and interviews from SI's Swimsuit magazine photo shoots, with behind-the-scenes footage and full-length videos following later this month. Finally, for all you hockey fans out there, the NHL is coming to Joost. We'll begin with Vintage games this month; full-game replays and highlights will follow soon.

We've also made changes to the widgets you find in the My Joost area of the user interface. We've added the CNN RSS feed to the Joost "News Ticker." And in a very exciting update, as of today you'll be able to invite as many friends as you'd like to Joost. Now, when you visit the "Invite Friends" widget, you'll be able to share Joost with an unlimited number of friends, family, colleagues - or anyone else you know.

Stay tuned.

As you might have discovered already, we're having some problems with the central servers in Luxembourg... We've been flooded with demand, which is fabulous and ultimately will make the system stronger, but since it's unaccustomed to this level of usage it's stumbling a bit, whereas we'd like it to be sprinting. While we regret that some of our new and existing users aren't getting the experience they should right now, we're getting an incredible look at the system at work (and more importantly what's not working) so that we can reduce the likelihood of this happening again.

We'll post again when the issue is fixed.

Thanks for your patience...we're getting there.

Cheers,
Fredrik

Good news - we've been able to build a fix for our central servers. In addition to this fix, we are in the process of fortifying and upgrading our central systems. We'll be adding new servers in Luxembourg to manage the searches and channel listings by early next week.

We've also learned a lot about our system in the past couple of days, and more good news is that the P2P network is working well.

While we are in beta, there are bound to be some hiccups, but we are continuing to develop the system and are committed to success. We appreciate your patience and your help as we work to improve Joost.

We're glad to be able to announce a new version of Joost. You'll see that we've fixed some bugs since the last release, which should improve your experience. See the release notes for more information.

Hi everyone,

I'm standing in as release manager this week and I've also been shepherding some of the newest features to a release, so I thought I'd give a little introduction to the latest release. First thing to note is that it's primarily a maintenance release with a bunch of bug fixes, including some adjustments to advert insertion points, "hand- raisers" (small boxed ads), some small things in the P2P layer, and some updates to the chat widgets.

The main changes you may notice are in the area of Joost links and in the addition of a new Widget: "Blog This". Each video and channel in Joost now has a web page or "Joost Link", associated with it, so that, if you so wish, you can link, blog, tag or cross-reference these pages to talk about the videos or channels that they represent. The page itself checks if you have Joost installed and if you have, you can click on a link which will fire up the player. Or you can just drag the link into the player and it will play. Joost Links have been quietly working for a while in the background, but now they work with channels as well as video. You can get the Joost Link from the info button in the player and then copy it where you'd like.

You can also use the brand new "Blog This" widget to blog about the video you are watching straight to your own blog, which also sends the Joost Link as part of your blogpost.

On our new developer site you can find out more about Joost Links and also some general information about our forthcoming developer API for widgets.

Soon you will be able to create your own widgets and do all sorts of interesting things with those and Joost Links. In the meantime, we hope you like what we have here and that it improves Joost for you.

Let us know either way!

May is a huge month for the IndyCar Series, and it all culminates this Sunday at the Indy 500. By the numbers, 33 drivers will run 200 laps around a 2.5 mile track at speeds topping 220 miles per hour, in front of more than 300,000 people - making this the biggest live single-day sporting event in the world.

With that in mind, some of us headed down to Indianapolis this week to meet with our friends at IndyCar Series and IndyVision, and to meet other partners. I gave a short presentation and demo of Joost at the business update meeting, and then it was off to check out the pits and the garages.

For those of you who don't know, IndyVision, the multimedia arm of IndyCar Series, already has two channels on Joost, and is adding more programming very soon. IndyVision also has a racing team, Vision Racing, and four Vision drivers have qualified for Sunday's race.

So we walk out to the pits, and the first thing that catches our eye is below - the Joost Ethanol can. For the first time, all of the cars at the Indy 500 will be running on Ethanol - not only is this better for the environment, but the cars get a lot more gas mileage.

Then we head up to the edge of the track and watch a couple of cars zooming around - probably at a fraction of the speed they'll race on Sunday. From this angle, we caught sight of this:

We all thought that was pretty cool, but not quite as cool as this:

That's Brian and me with THE Joost car - the No. 2 car that Tomas Scheckter will drive on Sunday. There's another one that looks just like it, which they'll use for today's pit contest.

So this Sunday, tune into ABC at noon EDT and root for Tomas Scheckter in the No. 2 car (or the other Vision Racing drivers - Ed Carpenter, Davey Hamilton and A.J. Foyt IV).

It's official: Joost will be at Comic-Con in San Diego, CA this year. (Note: This is like going to Woodstock for some of us.)

Our good friends at Warner Bros. TV were kind enough to invite us to join them at their booth (No. 4329), and we have some pretty exciting stuff planned. To start with, we'll have a Joost demo running, showing the masses the awesome power of Joost and the shows you can watch currently on the WBTV: SCI-FI FIX Channel.

For example, right now we have Babylon 5, Max Headroom, Time Trax and the Aquaman pilot on the channel. Soon you'll be able to watch The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Invasion, My Favorite Martian, Prey and, my personal favorite, V. (Just now, while writing this post, I read the Wikipedia entry on V. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(TV_series). So good!)

Speaking of Aquaman, the star of the pilot, Justin Hartley, will be signing autographs for Joost at Comic-Con. He'll be at the Warner Bros. booth from 3 to 3:50 p.m. on Saturday, July 28, so line up early.

Being a Comic-con newbie, I'm not quite sure what to expect. A group of us from Joost will be there for what should be an interesting experience. I'll be sure to update the Joost blog with pictures of the event and stories after the show.

PS The WBTV SCI-FI FIX Channel is only available in the United States. If you're hungry for some sci-fi in other countries, I highly recommend Alliance Atlantis Sci-Fi.

PPS I came up with a lot of possible geeky headlines for this post, like bad Aquaman puns and such. I applaud myself for showing restraint.

I'm happy to report that the Joost crew made it back from our first Comic-Con in one piece, and in true sci-fi fashion, we have now graduated to Comic-Con apprentices.

From the moment we arrived in San Diego, the scale of the event amazed us - and the enthusiasm and excitement of the attendees were truly impressive. The convention center was absolutely packed every day, and Comic-Con attendees basically took over all of downtown San Diego.

We had a great time meeting fans, and were impressed by everyone's reactions to Joost. Our "costumes" - Joost T-shirts - didn't leave much to the imagination. People asked us for invites everywhere we went, whether we were walking around Comic-Con, battling traffic on the street or hanging out in downtown bars and restaurants.

As promised, Justin Hartley, a.k.a. Aquaman, braved the traffic from Los Angeles to San Diego to sign autographs and help us promote Joost. Justin was mobbed by fans but managed to keep his cool, signing posters and taking pictures with a smile.

Check out the pictures of our Comic-Con adventures at http://flickr.com/photos/websternyc/sets/72157601126928155/.

Special thanks to Rachel and all our friends at WBTV for their hard work and hospitality throughout the event.

(We found a couple of fans among the artists at the show. One of them, Jason Martin from Super Real, took the time to make this Joost sketch for us.)

It's summer here in London and ironically, that's meant quite a bit of rain and nothing good to watch on TV.

Since we're getting more and more content on Joost, we've hired Noelle to blog a bit about the stuff she likes, so she can help you find the coolest shows and programmes. She's indeed our first very own "Joost Jockey". Noelle was the lead producer of two Grand Theft Auto Games (San Andreas and Liberty City Stories), which is about as cool as it gets. She also does Hapkido, freestyle wall jumping (check out her Flickr page for that story), and is in general a bit nuts. She will be guiding us all to some of the funny, interesting, stupid, or just plain bizarre shows she finds on Joost and thinks are worth watching. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop her a line.

Myspace: http://myspace.com/watchjoost
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7045041320/
Blogger: http://watchjoost.blogspot.com

Enjoy the rest of your summer with some good and free TV.

Are you using the latest version of Joost - version 0.12.0? If not, it's time to upgrade! We're about to make a lot of changes to our community, security and UI features and we need to get everyone onto the newest version of Joost.

If you're on a PC and reading this before September 10, start up Joost and let it run for a couple of hours. Joost will upgrade automatically.

If you're on a Mac or reading this after September 10, go to www.joost.com/download to upgrade to the latest version.