Sander van Zoest: Behind the Scenes

These last few months have been very exciting and thought provoking. After working on many interesting and challenging problems to create an ecosystem of content, software and consumer electronics at DivX, I decided it was time to take a break. I have had a fantastic time working with some great folks on the underlying technology that powers a video on demand service in Italy, a whole new digital home platform named DivX Connected that is designed for portability and low cost embedded devices and building an architectural foundation to enhance productivity and maintainability for the company as a whole. It was a great experience and I would like to thank Jordan Greenhall for his trust in me and the opportunity to contribute to DivX.

I wanted to spend some time at home with the family. Doing this has been one of the best things I could have done. It clearly has created a much closer bond with my daughter and I have been able to catch some key accomplishments of her. It was uncertain for me as to how long I would be spending at home, but as soon as people found out I was spending time at home, I got a lot of inquiries, proposals and offers for new positions all around the world. The time off also allowed me to catch up with a lot of friends and old co-workers which was very needed as well.

There were a lot of events, such as DivX going public on NASDAQ and the Google/Youtube deal, that brought even more inquiries about when or if I would join another company again or if I would be interested in joining the founding team of some media startup, etc. All this buzz, did get me thinking about what I was going to do when I wanted to join the work force again. I contemplated on starting something on my own and spend a few years doing research. All of this opened a lot of doors and gave me an opportunity to keep my brain thinking about the online media space while spending time at home with the family.

After dozens of discussions with some outstanding teams and organizations, I decided to take on a Director of Operations role at a stealth media startup created by proven entrepreneurs who had put together a world class team of whom a few I had already worked with at previous companies or met through my involvement with Open Source. So, far I am really liking what I am seeing and applaud all the effort of the team that has put together what exists right now. It is truly amazing that this got put together in couple of months.

The company has been very quiet, although, recently has started to come more out of hiding and has said we can now talk more publicly about our jobs and the company we work for. Right now, the organization is publicly known as The Venice Project, but it will be re-branded at some point in the future when we are out of beta. If you are interested in what we are doing check out the company blog or sign up for a beta test account.

So, here starts another chapter in life. As I have come to realize, change teaches you a lot of things about what you had and what you have been missing out on. I am looking forward to learning more about both.

Another beta build has been released and we are getting close to extending beta test invitations to more people. We currently have limited bandwidth to Leiden, which will hold back the amount of invitations until we manage to get our primary datacenter on line. It is very exciting, but somewhat scary at the same time. Doing estimates on how many people you will be able to support with our current infrastructure is more an art then a science at this point. The more traffic and data we get, the better we will be able to predict our usage and load in the future.

It has been great to work with the operations team in getting our primary datacenter up and running. We still have a lot to do, but everyone is making sure we flag every SPOF and plan to address them as we build out our infrastructure. While we scale up for all of you to check it out. I provide you with a screenshot of the service to hold you over. I will provide you with more of them as time goes along.

If you haven't already done so, but are interested in checking out the service in person, please sign up to be a beta tester. It is the best way to ensure you will be able to experience the service as soon as we have capacity. We will be expanding the user base with invitations afterwards.

The project is very exciting and obviously has been keeping me very busy lately and I suspect it will for the next few months, if not years, to come. If you have contacted me lately and I haven't gotten around to pinging you back, this is most likely why. People want access to The Venice Project and there are only soo many hours in the day. I mostly have been spending that time focusing on the project and maturing the operations department to provide you the best experience that we can give. It is about time television leaps to the next level and takes advantage of globalization and the internet. I hope you feel the same way.

On another note, we all know by now that licensing content is a long process that takes a lot of time and effort. As described in my earlier post, you would need to talk to the content owners even if you are using the content as background music. Now how about screen shots of a product that delivers content over the internet? If the screen shows content then that could be compared to background music. Therefore the above screen shot of the Venice Project User Interface was specifically cleared by the TV content owner. Of course, how to clear the rights and which rights you need cleared differs depending on where in the world you are. This is tricky stuff. I am happy to say that The Venice Project is doing their part in providing screen shots that have been cleared by the content owners and working hard to provide legitimate playback of high quality content over the internet. Something that has been lacking quite some time.

Update (12/19/2006): I have been getting a lot of requests for invites lately, so I wanted to provide a quick update. Since we are still running on limited capacity all invites that I have are sent out. Best way to get access when our infrastructure allows is to apply on the TVP site.

Update (12/22/2006): Applications for beta testing are now no longer being accepted. We have been getting a ton of interest, so thanks for those who have already signed up. Access will be granted gradually once we get the Luxembourg datacenter online and tested. If you had not signed up yet and you want to be a beta tester, you will have to be invited by a current beta tester to join.