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Joost

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4/5 (minimum 1) by tom on 03 Apr 2007

According to the hype Joost holds the promise of revolutionising TV, and I think it may just work. The premise is basically TV on-demand over the net. I'm not sure it gets any more complicated than that. You download and install the client for Windows or Mac, fire it up, and have a look through the channel listing to decide what to watch.

At the moment Joost is undergoing beta testing, and the amount of content available is fairly limited. Highlights include the IndieFlix channel (check out the Inside Iraq documentary), some of the live gigs, and the surfing/snowboarding channels. The rest can be pretty obscure at times (do I really care about the World's Strongest Man channel?) but with a couple of big deals struck recently this is bound to increase, so have patience. Once it reaches a critical mass of content it will really be a viable alternative to regular TV.

Content-aside, the main things that hinder my usage of Joost are the demands it places on network and system resources. I have an uncapped 4Mb ADSL connection at home, and I still feel a bit conscious of how much data transfer is going on while I'm watching a programme. Is guess I'll just get used to this over time.

Despite the connection speed, the picture quality is still not what I feel the creators have promised. It's fine for documentaries, but suffers a bit when trying to watch surfing or snowboarding videos. If anything, the latest 0.9 version of the client has more hangs in the programming than previous versions, although this could simply be about network load.

Last of all is the issue of system resources. My machine meets the system requirements, but does get put through the wringer when watching stuff on Joost. This is especially true of CPU usage, and even some serious hard disk thrashing at times. I know machines are built for this sort of stuff, but I do have an image of something going pop.

The interface is very smooth to look at. It doesn't always work quite as smoothly, but the team do seem to listen to requests for changes. There are already some nice little widgets included, and I get the impression these are going to be a huge part of what Joost offers. It's really nice that they've gone for supporting Jabber rather than one of the other IM platforms, although people without Jabber or Gmail accounts will be a bit stuck, and so far I don't see any moves to address that. The channel chat rooms are never occupied by anyone else when I drop in, but hey, there are only beta testers to be there so that's hardly surprising. I can imagine this will be huge in the future for some channels, and dead for others.

Ultimately all my niggles will be resolved. We'll all migrate to more powerful machines, get more bandwidth, and Joost will get more content; so these aren't deal breakers for the whole venture, but may mean that people need a little more coaxing to get onboard. At the end of the day, it's free, you can watch it potentially anywhere, anytime, and I've never found the ads paticularly intrusive. TV does need a good shake-up. Virgin Media in the UK are doing some cool things with on-demand and replays. Joost takes this one step further. With some more careful manoeuvring by the team behind Kazaa and Skype, this really should be a big as the hype suggests.

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