Like a Virgin, seen for the very first time
In many ways I'm loathe to speak too much about The Venice Project as an application until it really is public and available and people can have their own virgin experience.
You'll see a lot of the blogs talking perhaps about it being TV the way you want it, ( no onion rings please ), and that's one of the aims as is the encouraging of community behaviour. That, for me, isn't the first impact that people will get and which I try and retain and make myself remember when the damn thing doesn't work.
Unlike any other video experience on the net its not about downloads, its not about having an account (though we'll have them but they'll still be optional) and its not about watching stuttery first time run throughs then playing it again so you get it with a full buffer.
Its about starting it, a few seconds of black, and then TV, all the time. The first time you see that, that's your virginity lost.
One of the challenges following the first time is to try and keep that initial reaction throughout the experience, not by people thinking 'hey, this is amazing its still running' (that's the experience we have in developing and QA'ing it so you shouldn't have to), but by it fulfilling that initial promise both in the content that we deliver and in the ways that we deliver it.
The original posting in the new journal is here