Joost Update

I've been playing around with the beta of Joost (nee The Venice Project) for a couple of months now. Or should I say playing around as time permits and otherwise smugly enjoying being an early adopter.

At any rate, it seems that the general public will soon have a chance to experience it for themselves. The company has announced that it will be moving to open beta at the end of the month. In addition, Joost has signed some major advertisers and will be adding some new premium content from Sony and Turner.

My thoughts at the moment:

• Everyone expects Joost will be a huge success. In fact, it's almost taken as a given. Which, if you take a step back and look at the situation objectively seems a little bit odd. After all, we're talking about a paradigm shift in the world of televised media which brings with it tremendous risks both technological and business. But I guess after Kazaa and Skype, Zennstrom & co have enough magic pixie dust to allay all fears.
  
• There is some decent content on Joost right now, but the majority of their programming doesn't speak to me. There's a lot of music content, some independent films, and some documentaries. Perhaps I'm older than the target demographic and that's why I don't connect.
  
• IMHO Joost will need to get a lot more popular mainstream entertainment before it can really take off. There's a lot of good independent content out there, but I don't need a dedicated application to access it. (I would go to Network2 or other competitors). The newly announced deal (which includes programming from CNN and Adult Swim, as well as old episodes of "Charlie's Angels") is a step in the right direction.
  
• Having said that, it will be interesting to see what kind of premium content they manage to get. Will it end up being a repository for old TV from the '70s and '80s? Would that be a bad thing if it happened?
  
• Joost also needs to work on its UI before it becomes ready for prime time. After three months I still find it awkward to get things done, including fairly simple operations like finding the list of all available channels and exiting the application. And if I have a problem with it, I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to my mother-in-law if she tried to use it.

Comments

[Jordan Green]

I came across your comments on Joost while looking for someone I know who works at Giza. All I can say is "DITTO". My experience echoes yours in all respects. On top of which I am seeing some very, very interesting plays in the video distribution space down here in Australia that seem to have already leap frogged the Joost model. All we can be sure of is interesting times ahead. :-)

[Yael]

I tried to try Joost but my computer didn't have enough ram. It needed 512 and I had only 480.

[Shai]

I actually managed to work the thing from my old laptop even though it also only has 480 RAM. It's a little punchy, but it works.