Whoo, so Joost has finally turned the corner and ditched that clunky downloaded player in favour of a complete Flash online experience eh? Well shiver me timbers and all that. All you need to do now is download a small browser plugin and you’re good to go. The good news? The video quality seems to have survived the transition nicely, and what’s more they’re making efforts to freshen up the content a little. Yay!
The bad news? The interface has gone walkies, and the content still seems a little…ahem…patchy. The site is far more difficult to navigate than it should be, which is a shame. The strange layout of the video box and comments also doesn’t help. But hey, these are minor points. Welcome back Joost, we missed ya. Now let’s see if you can start to deliver the entertainment that you promised before.
It’s pretty complex – there are a bunch of components that make Joost work. We have servers for the website, servers for the data that tell you information about the shows we have, and servers that manage your relationships. For the video, though, we do things a little bit differently, which is why we have a the proprietary video plugin, which we fondly call the Joost Plugin. Joost uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which means that you don’t pull the video from one specific source, but you pull bits of the video from the other peers (a.k.a. people like you) who are on Joost.
