Joost Review

I got my Joost invite today, and so very rapidly set out out to test drive it.

What is Joost?

What it really is (on the surface), is a collection of video clips organized by channel in a standalone player. What makes it unique and revolutionary is it's method of distributing the content - it uses P2PTV (according to Wikipedia). So instead of streaming content from a server, users stream from one another in a Kazaa-like fashion. That is where I think they are trying to differentiate themselves from traditional online video distribution networks - you don't need a whole bunch of servers, the network serves itself.

Interface

The Joost interface is pretty slick. The window is filled with whatever show you are watching, and when you move your cursor to any edge, four "buttons" come up.

• The Channel List - Clicking this brings up the list of channels
  
• "Interactive Information About This Program" - A description of the show, a URL and other shows on that channel
  
• "My Joost" - This is a section that has Joost "Widgets" (a Notice Board, News Ticker, an IM widget, a Clock, a 'Rate It' widget and a Channel Chat)
  
• The Control Bar for the video clip - You can pause the show, move to the next program in the channel lineup, get information about that show and that channel and also search for shows. The search feature is pretty cool. I'm not sure what it searches, maybe the shows have some metadata embedded in them, but I was able to find some interesting stuff.
  

The interface is minimal and simplistic, which is good for the most part. The button to go back in a series of menus could be more prominent, but other than that it's pretty good.

One feature (which may be good or bad, depending on your tastes) is that the show keeps playing while you browse through menus. You can of course pause the show while you browse through menus.

Usually the first menu I go to in any application is the "Options"/"Preferences" and it's really important to me how much control and flexibility I have. Most of the options are for changing the times and delays for GUI features. The others are your standard "Start in Full Screen", "Tooltip delay" etc. I haven't played around with them too much, but it seems to offer a good degree of flexibility.

Performance

The quality wasn't bad. I'm not sure what resolution they are advertising, but it was very watchable. There was some stalling, but it was far short of being even mildly irritating. It might have been because I'm on wireless, or some other traffic on my laptop. On the whole, quite smooth.

It takes between 30% and 50% (usually in the high 40s) of my Turion 1.8 GHz and about 70 MB of RAM. The network usage fluctuated from 50 KBps to 150 KBps, averaging around 100.

Content

Joost has a healthy dose of content right now. Among many others - some indie movies, an MTV channel, Nat Geo, Fifth Gear, some RHCP stuff and (joy of joys) a Paris Hilton channel with two shows. With Viacom coming on board, this can only get better.

Other thoughts

Joost is ad supported. The ads are usually played before the show (I haven't encountered any show where the ads were in the middle of the show).

Besides the fact that it is over a distributed network, the major news with Joost is that users cannot upload their own content. This was really what makes Youtube et al what they are, so I'm not sure if Joost is competing with them in that respect. What Joost is providing is an infrastructure for large, traditional content providers to distribute their content over the Internet in a secure and controlled manner. It really is like on-demand TV for the Internet. Everything that is done on traditional TV - movies, shows, videos - can be done on Joost. If it's ad-supported, then users can watch the shows whenever and wherever, without having to pay. It's streaming, so content providers aren't worried about copyrights. It seems like a win-win situation.