gei_spot

That would be cool, on my "downtime" it would be interesting to visit

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JulianW

Spotted this on one of the blog pages

Looks like you're going to have to wait for a while longer.

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rixride

Well I found a review on it. seems pretty interesting:

I've heard so much about Joost. Some of it can only be described as hyperbolic crap, some of it is intriguing opinion. I'm a little late to the party, but with the release of Joost 0.9 I thought I'd give it a try.

To sum it up, it's a great application, with a slick interface and some nice social features, but it's badly let down by its content. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The download, install, and sign-in process are all pretty standard. Happily, 0.9 has fixed the Vista incompatibilities found in previous versions, so things should even run smoothly on Microsoft's latest operating system. Once you've logged into Joost, you get a brief intro video which teases you with the content that's available on the "network". This all sounds rather good: there's a games channel, a manga channel, a football (soccer if you're in the US) channel, and many more - including a Guinness World Records TV channel.

The interface is slick too. There's a "My Channels" icon on the left of the screen, and "My Joost" on the right. Channels brings up, predictably, a list of available channels, while Joost brings up Joost's "widgets". These appear to be very similar to the Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X, or Konfabulator, or Vista's Sidebar. They include an RSS news reader, clock, chat channels (a nice touch; chat with like-minded viewers who are watching the same thing) and notice boards. There's always a "close" button in the top right (which looks a bit like a face with a handlebar moustache), and the playback controls, channel info, and search box sit at the bottom of your screen.

It all looks quite nice. The loading animation is a sort of tri-kryptonite icon (red, blue, and green) which spins around nicely, and looks suitably original. Hitting the standby button shrinks the picture down into a tiny dot a the centre of the screen, like an old cathode-ray TV; it's a nice touch. Video quality is, again, quite nice. It looks a bit blocky close up, at full-screen on a 1680x1050 display, like the one I'm sitting in front of now. To be honest, certain videos look a bit blocky in a window that takes up one quarter of the previously mentioned screen. But it's okay: you'd have to describe the video quality as "acceptable". Interestingly, the short Vodafone adverts that appear between "shows" are of a much higher quality than most of the Joost content.

I'm not sure how much of my bandwidth Joost is consuming; it's not really an issue for me as I'm not using a metered connection. I was still able to download at high speed, surf the 'net, and do everything else I'm accustomed to whilst watching Joost, with no appreciable disruption in service. I think the quality might have dipped, but I'm not certain. Regardless, that's quite impressive.

A personal complaint is that Joost doesn't hook into Vista's Media Center component yet. This would be nice; I'd like to be able to hop in and out of Media Center's content (ie my recorded shows) and Joost's content seamlessly, or at least without quitting Media Center and loading up Joost.

Which brings me to Joost's biggest problem. It's such a huge problem, in fact, that it essentially cancels out all the good stuff I've just mentioned: Joost's content is, in a word, shite.

Here's a run-down of the "Most Popular" channel:

• "Hot and Wet 2004: Strip Trivia" - a three-minute clip, in which the female host starts the show with less clothes on than one of the contestants (calm down boys, it's just a bikini top)
• "Shape Guessing" - A roughly 20 second clip, in which you're introduced to "the circle" and a shotgun
• "Porsche 911 Turbo" - a three-minute Fifth Gear video about, yes, the Porsche 911 Turbo
• "Surf: Hawaii Barrells" - a three-minute surf video
• "BMX: Jamie Bestwick" - a two-minute BMX video

And the list goes on...

You can occupy yourself for literally minutes browsing the extreme sports clips, Fifth Gear clips, and World's Strongest Man clips. The promised gaming videos are totally out of date, the manga channel features nothing I've ever heard of, and the only thing I found remotely entertaining were some Prodigy music videos on the XL Recordings channel. With its current lacklustre content, Joost is a nice tech demo but is far from a compelling application. Until they can sign some deals with major studios - assuming they're capable of signing some deals with major studios - Joost isn't capable of entertaining for more than a few minutes.

It's the perfect medium for film trailers, game trailers, and short films. It would be a great vehicle for broadcasts of TV shows; give us some early X-Files episodes, or Alias - something that's not recent enough to result in a loss of sleep for the networks, but that would at least entertain for a bit.

The Joost team need to fix this problem. I'm sure there's new content on a regular basis, but exciting as a small number of Joost users might find it, new - by which I mean two year old - episodes of World's Strongest Man are not a killer app.

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