Joost

Finally got my Joost invite this morning but am paranoid of chewing up too much bandwidth so I haven’t been looking at too many programmes (yet).

Joost bills itself as “a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.” And it’s free (once you get the invite) – and provided you have enough bandwidth.

So far I really like the look and feel of it but I’ll tell you more about it as I play with it. A couple of shows had errors but most of what we looked at came through fine. According to their blog, “the majority of traffic for popular content [is] being delivered solely within the Joost P2P network. However, it has also shown that mixing P2P and traditional HTTP traffic provides its own unique set of problems. We were aware of the kinds of issues we would encounter and now we are getting the full P2P effect that we designed for we can work on improving the interaction with the other back-end services. This means that some viewers will get errors when trying to view some shows, which is regrettable, but it does have the positive benefit that knowing that now means that we can work on fixing it, which we are doing.” (Did I say I really, really like hearing from the creators of a product?)

I don’t seem to have any invites to give away yet. Hopefully soon!

I am getting very good at typing with a puppy snuggled in my lap.