Joost
If you follow tech news even a little then you probably heard about Joost. For those of you that haven’t, here are you Cliff Notes. Joost is the latest project from the guys that brought us Kazaa and Skype. It is basically a program that will deliver streaming, on-demand television to your computer.
When I first heard about it I was mildly intrigued. I don’t pay for cable and my house has no antenna so I can only watch TV via the wonder of the internet. So anytime I hear of a program that offers internet-based TV I check it out. Unfortunately, most of the offerings miss the boat by a mile due to the fact that they can’t offer any really good content. Sure there are some podcasts that are good, but there are no podcast versions of 24. And how many YouTube videos can I really watch?
The other alternative is to download the shows you want. This works okay, but it is a bit of a hassle. Finding the shows and configuring your client is not an operation for neophytes. And getting it to do it automatically is more complicated. Then you have to wait for the download to finish before you can watch it. If it is obscure or even just old it can take a long time to download.
This why I am officially excited about Joost.
They aren’t building another YouTube where you watch other people’s crappy videos. They aren’t building another Democracy Player where you get strange content. And you aren’t downloading the video to you system to watch later. They are streaming content to you, on demand, via peer-to-peer.
And this won’t be just junk content. They plan to get real content. Sure they won’t start out with many heavy hitters, but if this starts to take off like I think it will, then you can bet that within a few years you can see some major shows on this platform. The best part is that it will be free, with only a minimum of advertising (they’re talking about 1 minute per hour of video).
It’s Windows only for the time being, but when they release a Mac client you better believe I am going to sign up. This could very well be the experience I have been looking for. There are a lot of hurdles left to clear, but if the market gets behind it the content providers will have to join in. This is looking to be the start of a IP-TV revolution.
Check out this article for a tantalizing taste of what’s to come.