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.

Happy New Year!

Thanks to a lot of hard work throughout this holiday season, we are now sending a big chunk of our Long Tail Storage cluster traffic from the new and primary datacenter in Luxembourg. We also recently released 0.7.2 which has fixes and adds support for the new datacenter. Colm MacCarthaigh made an excellent post on our corporate blog describing the launch, so I won't go into it here. It is not as redundant and setup as we like, but it is far enough along to where serving from Luxembourg made sense. I personally would like to thank the Operations team and everyone who lended a helping hand for making this happen.

With the launch of LUX, expect invitation tokens to be handed out to current beta testers while we expand the private beta to more individuals. Do keep in mind that this is just one datacenter of many that we will launch around the world during the upcoming year. Things are scaling and more stable every day, but we are still a startup that has lot of growing to do. I am very excited to have reached this milestone, though and I look forward to increasing capacity and redundancy during this new year.

After the last few weeks working on the grant brand reveal, we now have launched under the new brand Joost™. The brand is pronounced as "juiced" unlike the dutch first name Joost which is pronounced as "yoast". I can probably save a few minutes every day now that I only have to type five characters rather then sixteen.

I will adjust the category on this site to reflect the new name.

While we have been deploying more sites and scaling up our software, the content team has been doing a great job getting all of us some great new content.

We also have this concept of Joost Links that allows you to easily share shows with others. As we have added some pretty neat stuff, I figured I would point you to some of my favorite shows on Joost. Do keep in mind that not all shows are available in all regions. Unfortunately, we are still in a world where content is ruled by contracts per region, so even if Joost secures the rights for a piece of content it may still be restricted. The content owners may have sold the rights to someone else for a particular region and therefore are not able to offer the content in that region.

Anyways, download Joost and check out some of the content listed below:

• Max Headroom: Blipverts - http://joost.com/175001i
• Transformers - http://joost.com/0560016
• Ren and Stimpy - http://joost.com/0790001
• CSI - http://joost.com/094009j
• Audi Channel - http://joost.com/1050001
• F1 Documentary: Chasing a dream - http://joost.com/00200ub
• Fifth Gear Shortcuts - http://www.joost.com/01900b6
• Fifth Gear - http://www.joost.com/01900dz
• Nettwerk - http://joost.com/01800ba
• The Prodigy - Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix) - http://joost.com/092000t
• WMC 2007 - http://joost.com/065002i

If you are looking for some new backgrounds to grace your monitor or laptop then, do not forget to check out the goodies available on the Joost site. It has been a crazy amount of work getting all of this in place. I truly hope you enjoy Joost and please provide us (or me directly) with your feedback. We would love to hear what you think.

The adventure that was Joost and living abroad is just about complete. As you might have noticed by the lack of posts, I have been busy. What else is new right? Well, this time I was busy because of the birth of our daughter in November, followed by the realization that we really are very used to living in California and could use the space our house in San Diego provides. Although, I loved running Operations at Joost and working with such a talented group of individuals, our personal lives have a calling for San Diego.

As I originally left DivX, I quit to spend some time with the girls and look into starting up something new, however, I ended up talking to Janus and Dirk-Willem about their new european based online television project that seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to Europe and experience the talent across the pond. An experience it certainly was. I have high hopes for how the project will progress. Having experience working with a 9 hour time difference when I started. It is clear that this is something I am unable to take on again. Regardless, the relocation would take a good 3 months to do properly and therefore it made a lot of sense to just move on. We have had discussions on doing some consulting from San Diego, but it is clear now that does not make sense either. Both Leiden and New York are simply too many timezones removed from California.

So, in December I gave notice to the company and have been moving ever since. Our container with household goods has made it to California, so once it clears U.S. Customs and we have unpacked it will be life like normal again. If you are a Southern California local, I am open to meeting up, however, I do not expect everything to be in full swing again until May. Meanwhile, I am happy to say that having all this time with the family has been a great experience that I would not have wanted to miss for the world.

Joost, I would like to thank you for a ride I will never forget, but now it is time to look towards a new adventure.