Way too long a wait

I finally managed to get a beta invitation to Joost, the new Internet television service launched by the Swedish-Danish duo behind Kazaa and Skype. It’s nice, but not as wonderful as it might be.

Of course Joost is far better than any Internet television I have seen before. It makes MLB.tv look so 20th century. Full screen (looks nice on a widescreen monitor), just a little fuzzier than regular TV, and generally only a little lag.

The secret is that Joost uses peer-to-peer sharing rather than everything coming to you out of a single server. As a Joost user, I contribute to the network through-put.

The offerings aren’t wonderful, just a handful of stuff that looks like third grade cable channels, although there is an episode of “Earth Final Conflict” available. There are sports channels, but they seem to be mostly poker and people driving cars. The most mainstream sport available was soccer (and a Sport Illustrated swimsuit channel). Baseball would be nice.
Of course it doesn’t matter so much what the content is, the idea of the beta is to get a feel for what the channel looks like and how well it works with real TV quality video.

I was looking forward to watching several episodes of the classic “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons but those was some of several programs that seemingly refused to play. That was certainly one problem. Another is the interface. The difference from TV is that it is on a computer screen and you can click on the screen. But I found the interface often unresponsive, and sometimes when I wanted to change channels, instead I got window mode.

Supposedly you’re supposed to be able to chat with other viewers during programs. That doesn’t really sound like it enhances the TV experience, but perhaps it might be interesting during live sports.

The thing actually is pretty amazing, and these problems minor compared to the accomplishment, and hopefully they will be ironed out before launch. But my bigger problem is that I really am not that interested in watching TV on my computer. What I want is to get the world of video from the net into my television set.

Joost doesn’t do that.

When it’s working it works well