The Venice Project initial impressions

Technology

The TVP technology deserves a writeup of its own at some point, so I won’t go into too much detail here for the time being. They’ve assembled a cool team who also blogs about what they do (just look at the team member blogs from the main TVP blog). I understand the whole thing is built on XULRunner, a cross-platform Mozilla UI toolkit, so they should be able to cross-compile the whole thing for Mac and other platforms in no time, substituting the DirectX references with Quicktime or other relevant native video subsystem calls.

Widgets

One interesting thing they’re doing is “My Venice Plugins” that are effectively on-screen widgets for various purposes. Being a project based massively on open standards (Jabber for chat, AES for crypto etc), one wonders if these will make use of the W3C Widgets proposal. These days you have Microsoft widgets-gadgets for Vista, OS X ones, Opera, … . One thing to consider in the Widgets spec, though, is that there’s not much standardizing for the context. Should there be? I’m not sure. But I can surely envision widgets that have a common core function set that doesn’t care about the context (interacting with the public Internet and public data sources), but then it has extra objects to interact with. In TVP, the object would be current video/channel and TVP user. In OS X and Vista, it’s the operating system user and the whole OS context (e.g iStat Pro in OS X that displays various OS details). In browser widgets, it would be the current web page.

Uhhh… got off track, back to TVP

The initial run

The initial run is very very important. We’ve set a good “reference” installation experience with Skype, and the TVP was no different. Installation was click-click smooth. The only trick is that you’ll need to provide your e-mail address during installation — I guess your software gets somehow “initialized” with that and the e-mail/user account is the core part of their content protection. (This is also reflected by the fact that if you change your password, you have to do a reinstallation of the whole thing.)

When you first launch TVP and sign in, it first presents you a cool “whats new” trailer. This experience is very similar to another type of digital entertainment… video games. More about that below. But after the trailer, you end up in the “main interface” and can do stuff.

The user interface

I thought about how to rate the UI. It surely has the fundamentals right. Sometimes you see horrible UI-s that distort pictures in bad ways and have bad fonts and just generally bad organization and have no chance in succeeding. For an exapmle, see MyspaceIM. (At least it was like that a few months ago.)

TVP UI has clearly good fundamentals, good windowing, OK fonts, good interaction with the video subsystem and the layers above (transparency). Then again, some basic things are not done yet. Like none of the elements have tooltips. And while there are some universal idioms used, like “play” is play and “X” means “close”, there are several elements that you can’t make heads and tails of, and the general navigation is more complicated than it should be.

So I give TVP UI the mark between 50% and 66%, meaning it’s only half to two-thirds done and not more. This doesn’t mean that it would be bad in any way, it’s already very good. This just means that they got lots of more work to do if they really want to kick ass, and nothing less would be worth making anyway, so keep the UI press rolling.

Streaming, quality and storage

One thing that I notice is that streaming works really well and the quality is great. The quality is certainly comparable if not better than, say, the highest quality video podcasts that you get from iTunes. And streaming is one of the best I’ve seen. It provides you much much higher quality than, for example, on YouTube, yet with considerably smaller delay — the show starts pretty much immediately after you start it on my 2 Mbit downlink. True, there is stuttering sometimes and other bugs, but it’s one of the first wider betas, so a lot of work in progress.

TVP says that it uses P2P streaming to distribute content across users. Fine by me. The only question I have is, well, where is it on my computer? Maybe my node is not eligible for content redistribution or they haven’t enabled it or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that I’m not seeing any increased disk usage beyond the basic installation files. Cool. (UPDATE: my bad. The content is actually there, just not under Program Files, but under Application Data.)

Community features

One wonders what else you could do with TVP. Recently I’ve come to believe in proximity-based services, so a thing that would be easy and fun would be to have Bonjour support for TVP. (Bonjour is the technology that lets computers and services in nearby/same subnetwork easily discover and interact with each other.) So that you could discover if there are any other “watchers” around you, and see what they’re up to, and maybe chat either in the interface or get together in real life. This has obviously some privacy implications and needs opt-in, for example if I’m watching some goatse porn I don’t want to be too social about it, whereas if I watch Britney Spears videos and someone else watches Paris Hilton then maybe we would want to get together to exchange our deep intellectual insights about those.

“More than TV, and gaming”

The only discussion I have seen around TVP so far is about taking money and viewers away from media companies. Which is fine, but there’s a broader thing here I think, and that is the world of interactive games. For example, the closest you get to interactivity in the modern TV and two-way communication is SMS voting during a show. This is very often limited to certain countries because of roaming issues. None of that would be a problem on TVP. So you could very easily think of mega-shows that extend beyond borders and are available for whole markets. Plus the language question — in Europe, the market is fragmented both economically (see SMS roaming question above) plus across languages. In TVP, it would be dead easy to have several “language tracks” a la DVD.

Beyond that, I’ve played a few games that do not have immense UI-s and interactivity but are merely non-interactive video sequences with a few choices inbetween, that determine the progress of the game. You could imagine the potential of whole seasons of series combined around this, and combined with, uh, I don’t know, for example location-based games? Oh my. I can’t even imagine where this thing will be going.

Next steps

I’m really looking forward to this thing working on a Mac, since that’s what I (and a lot of other geeks) are using as the “daily machine” to do stuff on. (Did I say that at Le Web 3, 95% of demo/presentation machines on the stage were Macs?) So get the Mac version done, guys, and you’ll have a lot more of early influencers checking out your thing. Plus I could use the Apple Remote, not sure if there’s actually an API for that but it would make total sense and I could actually put that thing to some good use

Plus of course content. From a very practical POV, I travel quite a lot and sometimes for long yet I’d still like to stay in touch with my home news, and TVP would be the ideal way to do that. Let me know when you have a channel available for content providers to insert their stuff and I’ll make the connections that I want to see my favourite programs