December 19, 2006

Venice Project ( Joost ) in India

Invites started going out on the 12th of Dec for additional beta testers for the Venice Project and mixed reviews are coming in. I've asked a few beta testers what their impressions were and they were generally positive, although some said that starting up and exiting the program was a bit buggy. Interface needs to be polished and the reason Indian users might not take to it is because of bandwidth requirements. I tested the program out for a few hours but my 256kb/s connection couldn't handle it. The program requires about 250MB an hour, that means 512kb/s is a bare minimum and 1MB/s might be just enough, 2MB/s would be comfortable. Until then, the video runs in jerks and fits. For people with slower connections, the program could downsample on the fly and/or buffer data. Bsnl has stated it will be offering higher speeds from Jan 1, 07 but there is no explanation whether it will be unlimited or data limits will be imposed. Bandwidth in India sucks monkey balls. Am also wondering about broadcasts in other languages, like french(france is getting fiber in many places), german, swedish, places where good quality programming is available and bandwidth is freely available.

edit- The project's name has changed to joost and it's now at joost.com. However, I am not able to log in to my account on joost.com , probably due to some technical issues.
There's also a post on the joost blog about the software's bandwidth usage. https://www.joost.com/blog/2007/01/venice-s-bandwidth-usage.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've got a 512 kbps MTNL Triband connection and the stream is still very very jerky :-(