Joost: The Future of TV
How to Install Joost, Online TV Software From The Makers Of Skype
Understand what Joost is, how to install it, what the user experience is like and what there might be from Joost in the future.
What Is Joost?
Joost is the latest software from the same team that brought us Skype and Kazaa, and just like those technologies, Joost is based on peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer systems distribute the services (such as access to music files) traditionally held at a server across all the participants in the network. A peer-to-peer client both consumes services and provides services to the other peers in the system. By contrast, a traditional client/server system makes available services from the server with clients connecting to consume them. In a classical client/server system, clients don't provide services to other clients.
Getting Started With Joost
The installation experience was good. You download the client from their website and register your details. The client starts up full screen and you are presented with a number of movie trailers. Single-clicking anywhere on the screen brings up the Joost controls. At the bottom are DVD type controls to manipulate the current program. On the left and right of the screen are the two main options, Explore and My Joost. Explore lets you browse the Joost channels and shows. Single-clicking Explore brings up a list of program categories (such as Comedy, Documentary, and Drama), together with a scrollable list of the available channels in the currently selected category. If you hover over a particular channel, you can get a channel description, see the channel's programs and play the channel. Playing the channel plays the first program in that channel's list of programs. My Joost lets you use the program's social features and tools via the Widget Menu which contains options to invite friends, rate shows, blog and update your profile.
When using Joost on a Windows XP (SP2) machine, on trying to start Joost from the desktop shortcut, Joost always displayed an application error, that a breakpoint had been reached. It was not possible to start Joost unless it was started as part of installation (requiring it to be uninstalled). On another Windows XP (SP1) machine, this error didn't occur.
Joost Review
The user experience is just great, the look and feel is fantastic and the whole thing is very usable. The quality of the playback is very good, on both a 6Mbps home connection and on an office LAN. It's just like watching a regular TV. There was some jitter on the 6Mbps link, but this didn't really disturb the viewing experience and it seemed to be reduced over time. The software is very responsive, moving quickly between the channels and their programs and between the major interface components. The widgets are a nice idea, letting you customize the appearance of what is essentially the Joost desktop, when it is full screen.
Skype was about putting people in touch with each other using the Internet. Joost is about letting individuals watch TV online, which is not an activity we share in the same way we do with a telephone conversation. The drivers that caused Skype to become popular very quickly don't apply to Joost, given that TV is not as social an activity. Telephony is about people communicating with one another, TV is about one-to-one entertainment. You can watch TV with multiple people, but the relationship is between you and the TV show. There doesn't have to be more than one person involved for TV to make sense, as there does with telephony. Joost is free which is appealing, but for that to be a major driver there needs to be more content so that it's compelling enough for people to come back to time and time again. The support for blogging and chat seem to be an attempt to make people's TV experience a shared one, and this is an interesting direction to take things.
Why Is Joost Significant?
Joost has used a peer-to-peer model to distribute the load of watching TV among those computers currently using the network. If Joost was client/server based, all the processing load would have to be taken by a huge server installation. Whenever a user joins the Joost network they are contributing some computing power back as their machine is used to serve parts of a video for other users. This approach would not be possible if Joost had chosen to use a client/server model. By using peer-to-peer, Joost are able to scale their service and distribute bandwidth load among those in the network.
Joost has been compared to YouTube but they are completely different. YouTube is all about letting members of the public make short videos and broadcasting themselves over the web from YouTube's servers. Joost is about merging TV with the Internet and netcasting professionally produced TV programs from a current selection of 15,000. Joost is on-demand digital TV.
As Joost control the video format, they can add any additional features they want to. Video can be indexed, allowing viewers to skip to a particular sporting event within a program. Non video data can be distributed, providing advertising content for companies who have products placed in a movie. The Joost client knows who is watching what and this information can be made available to advertisers and TV program makers, giving production companies live information on the demographic and habits of everyone watching a particular show.
Obvious services for Joost to provide are show recommendations based on past viewing habits and the use of other technologies (such as SMS message alerts of new shows) to drive traffic to the Joost network.
Conclusions
Joost is yet another disruptive technology from a team who have proven their abilities with Kazaa and Skype. Joost is a fusion of the Internet and digital TV and it can only get better as more content is attracted and as the software is extended to further enhance the user experience.
