B&G’s Excellent Adventure

Joost

May 6th, 2007

Thanks to Simplehelp I was able to get an invite to Joost, which is in semi-private beta. I first heard about Joost in Wired a while back.

Having about 30 minutes of experience with Joost, I have to say it is pretty impressive. A really cool user interface, some good channels and it seems to work really smooth. I didn’t even need to make changes to my firewall settings (not sure if that is good or not). At any rate, this is likely the future of TV - on demand, over IP. There is just one issue - I don’t want to watch TV on my computer.

Seriously - I watch TV while using my computer. I am probably the minority, but even the best TV show only takes 50% of my attention. I usually surf while watching a show. Depending on the show, I might even be digging deeper in to things mentioned in the show on Wikipedia or Google (OK, most of my TV watching is Discovery Channel or National Geographic).

Now, if I could get Joost to work with Apple TV (or a Mac Mini, which might be even easier) and FrontRow, and thus get this functionality on my TV - it would be a killer app. Or I suppose if it could run on the Wii that would do it too. I hate to say it, but I just don’t want to watch video on my computer too much (long flights excepted).

If you’re interested, post a comment or send an email to joost at knieff2 dot com.

UPDATE - as of Sunday evening it doesn’t seem I can send Joost invites - the functionality is there, but doesn’t appear to work. I’ll try again tomorrow, hopefully it will work.

UPDATE 2 - seems to be working fine now, apparently it takes a week or two of using Joost to be able to provide invites.

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