Joost

I’ve been playing around with Joost recently. My initial impressions were fairly poor – the program took a while to load, and then when it finally did, it didn’t always behave properly – for example, you would pull up the channel list, and would get a blank screen with no channels listed.

When it did work, I was quite impressed. It gives the impression of flipping through TV channels, with short commercials between segments, and sometimes popping up in the bottom right corner of the screen. The audio was quite good, but the video quality was so-so – you could tell if something came from an analog source tape, but the digitally mastered stuff looked quite solid. One a show gets started, everything ran smoothly, without much stuttering or buffering, which was probably the most impressive part of the whole thing. There are also features that let you chat with other people who are watching the same show, which may be problematic if someone is a bit further ahead, and spoilers you to what happens (I’m not sure if it works this way or not…).

There’s a good variety of content right now, with an abundance of music videos. There are some longer format videos, from National Geographic and a few “How To” programs. The program asks for your age, and on some content, you get a “Must be over 16 to view” in the upper corner (this showed up on one of the music video channels for me), so there must be some sort of content tagging for appropriateness.

It’s a toy – a very slick toy, but ultimately not as useful as other P2P apps, and wont be anywhere near the success of other video sharing methods like YouTube, etc. You can’t save content for later or offline viewing, and other than the interactive aspects of watching video together, there’s little novelty in the system. Frankly, it looks like something that bored college students will play around with when they’re bored, and nothing more.