Joost Beta
As you can see from my sidebar, I am an official Joost beta reviewer.
Firstly thank you to Joost for letting me try out their marvelous service. Yes marvelous.
After downloading and setting up the easy Joost (Apparently pronounced as in juiced) client, which given I'm on a mac was a matter of dragging and dropping.
The client launches and you get to pick your channel off a simple menu and then chose a program. Yup that's it. It is TV on demand on the internet.
After a few seconds the program begins to play. Firstly you get a sponsorship message, or advert. This during my test was primarily for Vodafone. The caching and delivery of the episode is mostly fine. I spent my testing time watching most of a series called "Total Recall 2070" which was produced some time ago by Canada TV. It is Sci-Fi based obviously around the main threads of Rekall, memory implants and a bunch of other future dystopian technology. However the content isn't important, until later.
The quality of the program, the actual resolution, was very good, even at full screen the episodes were completely watchable as much as many of the DVDs I have of popular TV programs.
Whilst watching the controls are invisible and are invoked by moving the mouse to the areas occupied by the controls when visible they appear. You can skip about a program pretty well, if you want to jump significantly in the future you usually have to wait why some buffer of cache or other mechanism is filled up.
On the subject of space, I thought all this caching would be eating into my hard disk, after some searching I found a couple of gigs occupied by
Occasionally programs are interrupted by advertisements that you can't skip through. Actually just the one, advert breaks are everything they should be on broadcast TVs - short and thus more likely to keep you sat in place and viewing, unlike the near ten minutes advert breaks I sometimes get bored of and click away on TV or get up and make a coffee, thus not seeing the expensive well researched advert content. Where it was lacking, was the mixture of adverts... if I see one more advert for the one button virus recovery on the new Thinkpad, I'll scream.
However clearly the repetition worked because before trying Joost I didn't know that the Lenovo Thinkpad offered one touch virus recovery.
A reoccurring error I found in many episodes was all of a sudden the Joost client would report that a program was suddenly unavailable.
However that wasn't entirely accurate, I soon found that if I restarted the program and skipped to a point just after the last failure I could happily continue watching the same episode, I estimate that clearly those pieces of the puzzle weren't accessible by my client in some kind of peer to peer fashion, which seems likely given the history of the developers (But I would like to check how the client distributes).
Anecdotally these errors have increased wince rolling out the invite beta program so some patience is required whilst they figure out how to scale I suppose.
Currently some content isn't appropriate for all ages, when you select content like this you are asked to verify that it is acceptable.
A pin for this verification can be set in the Client Settings.
There are quite a number of Channels, sport, lifestyle and Sci-Fi. What I did find personally annoying was the fact that I got most of the way through the series I had chosen to watch then found missing episodes and the final few were absent leaving me feeling somewhat wanting. I am looking forward to reviewing the poker channels though.
Finally when I exit Joost I'm engaged in a wonderful element of nostalgia:
Just like as a child I used to turn off my combined TV, Radio and Tape deck as the tube cooled I'd concentrate on watching the little white dot from the ray gun vanish.
Overall I look forward the playing about with Joost a bit more there are some social features promised, like "Watch with friends" a kind of chat room feature for programs you're watching. A news aggregation feature built in etc.
There is currently both a windows and a mac client, it'd be nice to see this playing on a mini (Or a hacked Apple TV) connected to a TV with a remote, maybe a hack to work with the Apple remote. This may already exists but I've lost my Apple remote so I can't test it. Clearly there is a chicken and egg problem right now, content won't come without media deals and advertising revenue, which won't come without decent content, I think Joost is certainly one to watch.
If anyone wants invites, let me know - I'll see if I have any I can throw your way. There is scant official information about Joost, other than.
Joost.com
and an interview in Business week about what was then known as the Venice project. here
Firstly thank you to Joost for letting me try out their marvelous service. Yes marvelous.
After downloading and setting up the easy Joost (Apparently pronounced as in juiced) client, which given I'm on a mac was a matter of dragging and dropping.
The client launches and you get to pick your channel off a simple menu and then chose a program. Yup that's it. It is TV on demand on the internet.
After a few seconds the program begins to play. Firstly you get a sponsorship message, or advert. This during my test was primarily for Vodafone. The caching and delivery of the episode is mostly fine. I spent my testing time watching most of a series called "Total Recall 2070" which was produced some time ago by Canada TV. It is Sci-Fi based obviously around the main threads of Rekall, memory implants and a bunch of other future dystopian technology. However the content isn't important, until later.
The quality of the program, the actual resolution, was very good, even at full screen the episodes were completely watchable as much as many of the DVDs I have of popular TV programs.
Whilst watching the controls are invisible and are invoked by moving the mouse to the areas occupied by the controls when visible they appear. You can skip about a program pretty well, if you want to jump significantly in the future you usually have to wait why some buffer of cache or other mechanism is filled up.
On the subject of space, I thought all this caching would be eating into my hard disk, after some searching I found a couple of gigs occupied by
Occasionally programs are interrupted by advertisements that you can't skip through. Actually just the one, advert breaks are everything they should be on broadcast TVs - short and thus more likely to keep you sat in place and viewing, unlike the near ten minutes advert breaks I sometimes get bored of and click away on TV or get up and make a coffee, thus not seeing the expensive well researched advert content. Where it was lacking, was the mixture of adverts... if I see one more advert for the one button virus recovery on the new Thinkpad, I'll scream.
However clearly the repetition worked because before trying Joost I didn't know that the Lenovo Thinkpad offered one touch virus recovery.
A reoccurring error I found in many episodes was all of a sudden the Joost client would report that a program was suddenly unavailable.
However that wasn't entirely accurate, I soon found that if I restarted the program and skipped to a point just after the last failure I could happily continue watching the same episode, I estimate that clearly those pieces of the puzzle weren't accessible by my client in some kind of peer to peer fashion, which seems likely given the history of the developers (But I would like to check how the client distributes).
Anecdotally these errors have increased wince rolling out the invite beta program so some patience is required whilst they figure out how to scale I suppose.
Currently some content isn't appropriate for all ages, when you select content like this you are asked to verify that it is acceptable.
A pin for this verification can be set in the Client Settings.
There are quite a number of Channels, sport, lifestyle and Sci-Fi. What I did find personally annoying was the fact that I got most of the way through the series I had chosen to watch then found missing episodes and the final few were absent leaving me feeling somewhat wanting. I am looking forward to reviewing the poker channels though.
Finally when I exit Joost I'm engaged in a wonderful element of nostalgia:
Just like as a child I used to turn off my combined TV, Radio and Tape deck as the tube cooled I'd concentrate on watching the little white dot from the ray gun vanish.
Overall I look forward the playing about with Joost a bit more there are some social features promised, like "Watch with friends" a kind of chat room feature for programs you're watching. A news aggregation feature built in etc.
There is currently both a windows and a mac client, it'd be nice to see this playing on a mini (Or a hacked Apple TV) connected to a TV with a remote, maybe a hack to work with the Apple remote. This may already exists but I've lost my Apple remote so I can't test it. Clearly there is a chicken and egg problem right now, content won't come without media deals and advertising revenue, which won't come without decent content, I think Joost is certainly one to watch.
If anyone wants invites, let me know - I'll see if I have any I can throw your way. There is scant official information about Joost, other than.
Joost.com
and an interview in Business week about what was then known as the Venice project. here
posted by M at 9:00 AM
6 Comments:
If you still have one, I would really appreciate an invite, thank you either way.
Best Regards,
Dre
dremeda@gmail.com
hook me man!
brianchoffman at gmail.com
If you still have an invite, I'd appreciate one:
robert.biddle AT gmail.com
Do you still have any invites:
antispimmer@gmail.com
I'd appreciate it if you could.
joostme@jswjimmy.com
Here you are guys, follow the link
https://joost.com/presents/gigaom-newteevee/
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