We've been asked a lot about how The Venice Project™ uses bandwidth, following articles at out-law.com and elsewhere based on the documents provided to our beta testers. We thought it was worthwhile explaining a bit more about what we've been doing here and how it compares to other forms of online video-based entertainment.

Full-screen video of any kind inevitably use a lot of bandwidth, and The Venice Project™ is no exception to this. The software downloads about 320MB per hour (as a maximum) and uploads up to 105 MB per hour. The more popular the content is on our platform, the more sources it can be pulled from and the less redundant data we send; that number can be as low as 220MB per hour of viewing. We've made what we think is a reasonable trade-off between the quality of the picture and the bandwidth usage, but this is full-screen TV-quality video - so there are limits on how low we can keep bandwidth usage while delivering good picture quality.

Because we're aiming for a TV-like experience with continuous streaming video and the ability to flip channels, we're in a somewhat different situation to other systems, which are usually about downloading specific pieces of content and then watching them. But to provide some degree of comparison: a digital television feed from a satellite uses something between 14 and 70GB per hour; compressed digital television works out at between 900MB and 3GB an hour viewed, and DVD is of the same order. A TV episode downloaded through a file-sharing network will usually set you back about 350MB for a 45 minute episode in reasonable full screen quality. Video pay-per-view downloads will usually set you back around 400 MB/hour for television quality full-screen to 3GB/hour for high definition movie trailers.

Most people have high-speed connections without restrictions and can more than handle this bandwidth demand, but some ISPs (especially in the UK) cap bandwidth access, so we suggest that you take a look at your provider's bandwidth policy before using The Venice Project™ for any lengthy period of time.