Im in the project....The Venice Project that is!

The Venice project combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

- TVP homepage

Yesterday I got a mail stating that I was now selected to be a betatester of the "secret" project called The Venice Project. The guys behind it is the same as the ones behind Skype, and this should be then next biggest thing that combines TV, internet, communities and the rest of the buzz. I love to follow projects like this but I am always skeptic when it comes to the outcome of them - this was also the case when I logged into my beta account to check it out.
Their homepage looks like my old all-ascii homepage (except that they have a logo) and it all seemed very simple and basic. The same was the case for the actual program - a single 9.5mb exe file including the entire system.
Since I'm a linux guy myself, I had to borrow a Windows box in order to test the system (they promise to have a linux and Mac version ready soon). The installation is as easy as 1-2-3 and afterwards the applications starts up automatically. All in all it resembles the ease of installation we had with Skype back in the days where installing that kind of applications was a pain.
I opens up in fullscreen and an ugly (text outside the borders) shows up. I logged in nd then it happened....I was actually a bit amazed by what I saw. A nice and quite intuitive interface (flickr has tons of shots here, which showed exactly what I needed and nothing more.
Now the OSX guys will probably say...hey they stole our good looking design while the MS dudes say...hey they stole our media center. but no no no. This is neither, but is a nice new idea based on the ideas from the last decade of media player evolution combined with the biggest thing from web 2.0, namely the community collaboration concept.

The quality of the video is shows was more than enough for a laptop screen as the one I was testing on.
I cant really say much more right now since I am still investigating, but I will promise you that much more will come when I get around to test it some more (especially when a client for may fav OS comes out ).

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