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What is Joostâ„¢?

Joostâ„¢ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We're in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

Awesome Content

Joost has content for everyone. Luckily I have eclectic tastes and can enjoy nearly everything. This week I’ve passively learned about the hyphy movement, sharks, and urban design. Additionally I’ve watched numerous music videos (and how they were made), extreme sports clips, and a lot of sports car reviews. Fascinating stuff, amazing content, and this is just the beta.

Introduction and installation

Joost is a streaming P2P platform for television. It brings you TV or near-TV quality content in an application that uses P2P protocols to fetch the content, but it’s not really transparent to the user, who simply has to start using it and needs not worry about how it does its thing. The app is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. It’s ad-funded, and from what I understand you won’t be able to simply share content on Joost like you can on YouTube. It’s TV in the old fashioned sense of the word - they give you content, you watch it; only on internet. It makes up for this with the quality of the content and the features of the software.

The installation is simple and smooth. Joost was behaving very nicely and it never crashed or stopped responding. I’ve noticed that when playing a video, Joost, on average, eats up around 35% of CPU time which is not that bad, but it’s also not negligible, as my Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.8 GHz is a relatively speedy beast.

Conclusion

Well, it’s free TV. It can’t be bad. The application works great, looks ok, and if you got a decent internet connection, you’ll have no problems using it. Its success will depend on the amount and quality of content, and of course, ultimately, the success of Joost’s ad-based business model. Everything else seems to be in place, so if the content is there, I’m sure people will love it.