I’ve been giving the beta of Joost a trial over the past few days. Just in case you missed it, Joost is the newest application from the folks who gave us Skype. It’s an online television service based around Peer2Peer technology (and why not…?) which is being hyped as the next huge thing in online entertainment.
First impressions? Um…it’s OK. The video quality is all right – think somewhat better than average YouTube in a larger image size – and the content is as you’d expect from a beta service, i.e. pretty thin. Overall it’s a promising start, although I am still struggling to find a reason why people will flock to this service and put up with advertising mid-movie etc, when they can just as well watch ordinary satellite or cable via a Slingbox and get the same or better kind of experience, and with mainstream programming. Ah well, I wish them all the best.
I think part of the reason people will use this service is because it’s free, and Slingbox costs a couple hundred dollars.
Traditional Cable TV “feels” free, even though you actually pay for it. You have unlimited access to a large amount of channels. Joost is the first thing (online) which approximates that experience.
This service should cause a lot of trouble for cable TV providers. The shift to “over the top” video delivery (to use Shelly Palmer’s term) is a direct challenge to cable TV.
If it takes off, Cable TV will lose a whole lot of money.
Kimberly
Some good points Kimberley. I suppose that until we see how their advertising and general monetisation strategy works, it’s going to be hard to give it an unqualified thumbs up (or down). It’s the usual equation – generating enough cash to afford to entice quality content to encourage eyeballs to make enough cash. They’re not novices, so there’s every hope that they’ll get the whole balance right, but if they don’t…..
Sounds interesting, but I need an invite to try it for myself… Have you one going spare ?
Joost seems to be the wave of the future. From what I can tell, it seems that Joost may be the first in really trying to combine two powerful modes of communication, TV and the internet. Unfortunately, I have yet to try out Joost, I have only read about it on Gizmodo and on the Joost website. I would love to see more of it if you have a spare invite.
thanks,
adam
As soon as I get any invites, I’ll start handing them out. :-)
I’m starting to like the Joost service more, despite today’s post about Octoshape. The quality looks like it’s on an improvement track of some sort. Or maybe it’s down to time of day/congestion etc.
Oh and by the way, I’ve now got some invites, so one goes to Mike and one to Adam. Only got 3 at the moment.
If you are still giving out invites i would really appreciate one. I heard about Joost a while back and signed up for beta testing but so far i am still waiting. So, if you could spare an invite that would be awesome.
I was really quite impressed with the quality, but the choice of programming was a bit limited: once I’d watched the 3 or 4 old skool Prodigy videos that interested me, I kind of lost interest a bit.
I got a Freecom USB-TV dongle doodad thing the other day, and I’m getting more use out of that right now – despite the video/audo being not so good.
Stick the Phil Spector trial on Joost and I’m there.