Gosdot

I signed up to become a Joost Beta-tester after reading a feature on the new program in WIRED magazine. Joost (which started life as the Venice Project) is a program that’s revolutionary not for the fact that it allows users to watch television TIVO style on the web, but because of the way it does this. It was created by Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis, the same infamous creators of Kazaa and Skype. Using the a similar P2P sharing that the founders developed for Kazaa, Joost is neither 100% streaming nor is it 100% downloading or caching like most web-video services work. Instead, Joost works by tasking every computer on its network to store small chunks of information. When most video streams, it’s subject to the speed of the connection and the stability of the software it uses causing the video often hiccup. With Joost however, these concerns could largely become a thing of the past. By distributing the task of streaming and storing data across all the computers on the network, including your mine, and a few data clusters at their offices, it performs superbly!

From FranticIndustries:

The program is based on P2PTV technology and is expected to deliver near-TV resolution images. It turns a PC into an instant on-demand TV without any need for additional set top box. News updates, discussion forums, show ratings, and multi-user chat sessions (often linked to the active stream/channel) are made possible through the use of semi-transparent widget overlays.

The current version of the software is based on XULRunner and the audio management re-uses the ZAP Media Kit. The peer to peer layer comes from the Joltid company, which also provided the peer to peer layer of Skype. The video playback utilizes the CoreCodec, CoreAVC H.264 video decoder.

It’s not perfect (it hiccuped quite a bit actually) but for the quality of video it delivers, this is excusable. The video quality actually looks as good as, if not better than, any thing else out there. I mean at full screen, on my Intel Macbook (glossy screen not matte) the video quality even surpasses the video podcast I download every week from Diggnation.com!!! The audio quality is great as well, at least coming through my laptop speakers and headphones. Although the stream hiccups every now and then, it never drops out completely although while writing this and watching “Secret of the Pharaohs” on the National Geographic channel I got this screen:

The biggest pitfall it currently suffers from, however, is content (and the lack of it). It boasts about 50 channels but I can say a lot of it is a bunch of D-list crap that no one wants to see. This is obvious, all the major media companies are waiting to see what Google, AOL, Yahoo and a handful of other video contenders do with their services before they make any real decisions. Outside of music videos and a few independent shows, there’s not much here even with channels from Warner Brothers, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET and Comedy Central. To give an example, the only stuff MTV offers is a bunch of episodes of Laguna Beach and something called Two-A-Days. Viacom’s Comedy Central only offers Dog Bites Man, Freak Show, and a show called Stella (I’ve never even heard of these and the only channel I watch on TV these days is Comedy Central. It’d be nice have these two networks throw some real powerhouses on here like Southpark, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, past seasons of the Real World or whatever. You get the point, the hits from the boobtube should come to the Joost-tube. There’s also a few smaller network channels or completely original channels like The Fight Network which is a collection of footage from various mixed martial arts shows that air in France and Hawaii. In addition, some programs on Joost don’t belong to any channels whatsoever, which means they can only be found by searching for them.

Another problem is that, although the video plays back relatively fast, the software itself isn’t so speedy. For instance, the channel menu thumbnails don’t populate as quickly as they should. It’s almost better to leave them out if they aren’t going to work instantly.

BEFORE

FIVE MINUTES LATER

But to give the Joost guys the benefit of the doubt, although I tested the service on a broadband connection, I was using my laptop wirelessly which may or may not effect the performance of the software. Also, like any P2P device, the performance of Joost will undoubtedly improve as more people begin to use it. Theoretically at least, since it shares streaming tasks, a bigger network would translate to more stable playback.

Another cool feature is the fact that Joost will run at full screen, even in the background of any other application (at least on OS X it did) without other tasks effecting it’s performance. The overlay function is another nice touch.

From Joost:

Like the extras on a movie DVD, some programmes have added features. If the topmost icon is shown in color, it means that there’s something extra for you to play with.

Closing Joost out was interesting. There is a littler power button that, when clicked, makes the screen mimic the way a traditional television image shrinks to singularity when powered down. Each clip features a chat program that seems useless but if you want to chat with anyone out there who who may be watching the same channel or clip as you, this feature was included joost for you (pun intended)! Keeping with the themes of Web2.0, Joost allows users to share what they happen to be watching with other users or anyone with an e-mail address. There are ‘widgets’ which allow notices to posted and tagged to specific shows. For instance, if you’re watching a show that you know a friend of your would like, just stick a notice on it and share it with them. You could leave useful notes, or silly stuff, whatever you want your friend to see would pop up when they tune in. You can even tag a show with a pin number so that only certain users can ‘unlock’ it and watch it. These widgets are similar to the widgets found on OSX and Konfabulator (Vista too but it calls them something else). The Joost creators also tell us that soon we’ll be able to create our own widgets for use with Joost. Could this mean a Joost API is not far off?!?!?!

Another, admittedly, nerdy feature that I found useful is that some of text in Joost is “copy”-able. So if there is a notice you want to save, or a description of a show that you want to blog, you can simply copy and paste it. I didn’t realize I even wanted this feature until I started to write this very blog entry and I wanted to quote some dialog from the program. Serendipity is always lovely!

At one point I purposely crashed Joost to see what would happen. To my surprise, when I relaunched the program it remembered exactly what I had been watching and where I was during the clip. Convenient if you’re watching at work and you have to force quit quickly to hide your dilly-dallying from your boss (which I do all the time)!

My initial thoughts on JOOST are that it’s a great service, they just need to work harder at convincing the big networks that this product is going to be the king of the hill when the dust settles. This would mean that these companies would be keen on using some of their bigger shows here, whch will in turn draw a bigger userbase to Joost. Good luck, Joost, you’re up against Google and the ultra weird Fox/NBC/MySpace app that has yet to debut.

Another major strength of Joost is that it will offer international programming which could, hypothetically, one day take all the world’s major television broadcasts and make them available via one singular interface! That said, Joost is poised to do one of two things. Either it will revolutionize television and web broadcasting, or it will quietly fade away, never to be heard from again. Remember Intertainment? Didn’t think so.