Since I moved to the UK I never had a telly, never really wanted or needed one.
Last week I was invited to the private beta of Joost, the new product/startup by the ex Kazaa/Skype creators. I had heard about Joost a while ago and I clearly remember thinking that it was an unbelievably brilliant idea, and that if the product (then code-named Project Venice) would live up to all the hype it would be a smashing success.
For those of you who don’t know what Joost is or how it works here’s the link to the FAQs with a brief explanation.
I’ve now played with it for a week, it’s incredibly cool. I’ve never been a big fan of YouTube, or rather, I never believed that it would take telly’s place in our hearts. It a web site, and you have to watch the videos on a computer screen. I don’t know why but in my deranged mind that just doesn’t work. Even if my telly is smaller than the computer screen I still use it for films… films are meant to run on the tv set. But that’s just me.
It may be a bit too early to express a final judgement on Joost, there isn’t enough content and the number of users is still limited, but the promises are all there. And since the software is using p2p technology (Bittorrent’s if I’m not wrong, but don’t take it seriously because I really can’t remember) an eventual increase in number of users would just improve the overall performances of the network.
I spent my week-end watching “Fifth Gear” and “National Geographic Channel“, the video quality albeit not being optimal is certainly better than YouTube’s. And I’m really excited to read on their (Joost) blog that they have struck a deal with Viacom. Something YouTube hasn’t yet managed which will add a considerable amount of content to the Joost platform.
One of the reasons I like it so much is that they’re developing a MacOSX (Intel) client as well, and they’re keeping it up to date with the windows one, something they didn’t do with Skype.
The software is great, lightweight fast and with an un-obstructive simple interface. All the panels are transparent and comfortably available on each side of the main window. Really well done, usable and glamorous at the same time.
The app also tries to integrate some of the top features of web2.0 websites such as ratings comments and 
interactive chat with other members who are currently watching the same video. This is a smart and really useful thing if you are a social network/web2.0 junkie, I’m probably never going to use it myself, but I’ll probably trust in the ratings to pick a feature for a film night.
I only hope that other broadcasting companies will follow Viacom’s example and will start proposing their content as on-demand videos on Joost.
Kudos to the Joost team!
