This is NOT a paid review. I say this because I've done paid reviews before here.

I managed to get a Joost invite from Last 100, giving me a chance to review what the fuss is all about.

What is Joost? To quote their website:

The new way of watching TV

All the things you love about TV, fused with the interactive power of the internet – just the way you want it. Enjoy the ride!

...which doesn't say much. Really, it's a P2P based TV channels distribution network. Think Kazaa but instead of delivering MP3 files, it's actually streaming video. Very neat way to solve the technical problem of serving huge amounts of content.

Does it work? Well, sort of. The picture quality is on the low end of what you can achieve with TV. It obviously uses up a ton of bandwidth on your end, and so it's very sensitive your connection settings. On a wireless broadband here in the UK, it worked acceptably well, but it was definitely choppy at times, and the sound quality suffered. Interestingly, the video would keep running but the sound would grable or jump. I'm guessing that perhaps the Joost software gives higher priority to the video stream (if video and audio are actually split). Also, when a new channel starts playing, the quality is terrible but quickly moves up to good.

Also, the software is very - let me say this again, VERY - demanding. On my dual-core 1.8GHz computer, the whole computer seemed to slow down. The mouse would jump, the screen would take a while to refresh and all other symptoms of high CPU usage. Task manager showed that Joost is using 60% of the CPU all the time.

Content-wise, it's a bit thin, at least for what I'm interested in. Randomly channel surfing, I came across some kind of UK users generated record breaking channel where ordinary folks decided to break world records. I decided it was not good after watching the first segment featuring five men on all fours racing like greyhounds, on a dog race track, chasing the same rabbit the dogs usually chase. Thank you, but YouTube is already filled with such crap. However, this seems to have triggered a bug because everything I would watch afterwards was a repeating cycle of ads: a car, HP, then Nike, then Intel, then back to the car advert and repeat.

The interface is also a bit... mysterious. Lots of buttons and animations but you really have to hover over everything to figure out what it really does. Coupled to the general slow-down I mentioned earlier, I routinely double clicked everything early on because I thought my first click didn't register. The interface looks like it was designed in Flash. However, the controls are small enough not to distract too much from the actual content, a major plus.

By default, Joost wants to run in full-screen mode, and some features demand full-screen functionality. I don't know why it is so picky, but at least you can watch in a window and snap in and out of full screen occasionally. I wouldn't watch full screen given the low quality video.

So big picture: is it a Good Thing? Yes. For all its technological and user experience shortcomings, Joost will undoubtedly grow to be a major force in online video. If they decide to allow ANYONE to broadcast content (like YouTube), then they really could change the game. Can you imagine stringing a bunch of video blogs and creating a channel? THAT would be awesome - your own personalized channel. They would need an API to simplify subscriptions and easy manipulation of channels, but it's not much of a jump given what they've already done.

So: watch this space (if you'll excuse the pun).

Finally: if anyone wants Joost invites, drop a comment below and I'll send one to your email address. I have to do the invites manually, one at a time, so if a lot of people ask, please be patient :).

Technorati Tags: joost, online video, youtube