Digital Home Thoughts: Joost: Fresh-squeezed or is it the Pits?

Juiced? No Silly! Joost!
If you've ever used Skype or Kazaa, you know the work of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

Much like Kazaa and Skype, Joost uses peer to peer technology to bring high quality video and audio right to your desktop (or laptop) computer. The cool part is that it's not just television in the sense that there's a schedule of programs that you watch when the network delivers them, but rather a queue of shows on channels that you can watch at will. Think of a Tivo that records every single show on a channel for you to watch whenever you want.

Where Do I Sign?
You don't, at least for now.

Much like many other Web 2.0 services, Joost is by invitation only. Although they've greatly expanded the allotted invitations given to each user, it's still a closed system and unless you receive an invite, you're out of luck. Considering the technology, it's likely they wanted to make sure it scaled before they opened it up to anyone interested.

So, What's It Like, Seeing As I Can't Get In?
Frankly, it's pretty cool. The first thing you're going to want to do is pick a channel to watch. There are lots of odd options like CNN, Comedy Central, The Transformers (right now they're showing Armada... UGH), National Geographic, and a few others.


Figure 1: The Joost Channel Guide

Clicking on a channel brings you to the shows that are on that channel, and from there, it's one click and you're up and running. The show starts relatively quickly, and I experienced very few slowdowns / stuttering on any of the shows I watched. The video quality isn't exactly HD, but it's still halfway decent. It's more than watchable, but don't expect to be wowed.

The interface to Joost is what really shines. It's clean, functional, and while it may not be intuitive at first, it makes sense very quickly.


Figure 2: The Joost interface while watching a program. You can clear the entire screen of everything but the program you're watching by clicking the circular control in the upper right corner of the window.

Across the bottom, you have the usual controls you would expect including a progress bar that you can slide forward or backward, a volume control, show info, channel info, a button to switch from windowed to full screen and back, and many others. On the top of the window is the channel logo, to the left is a widget that brings up the channel guide, and on the right is My Joost which brings up any widgets you might want to try out.