Joost test drive
Today I received an email invite to download JOOST. The name sounds weird, it has a kind of Amsterdam feel to it. It's one of those silly, meaningless words like SKYPE, for instance. It also comes straight from the same crew that built Kazaa (another silly name) and yes, Skype. Apparently the ghost in the machine is the same - an incredibly complex peer-to-peer, load-balancing, bandwidth-throttling core application developed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstromm. It's a very good idea, and just like Skype, if done right it has the potential to profoundly rearrange your daily routine.
The app itself is not even beta. It's like, alpha. The version I downloaded (for MacOSX) was 0.1.xx or something. So it basically quits if you jerk it around too much. I run it on a mac mini with a core duo @ 1.6 GHz and 1 Gb of RAM. Basically, a middle-of-the road set-up.
So what of Joost? It runs ok. Image quality is fine, but TV-resolution, so a little blurry at times. I understand they also serve HDTV programming, but I haven't really tried it because accessing channels is a fairly involved process. There are so many of them, and most of them are useless. I understand that as they reach public release, they will sign on big, major content providers. For now, the prospect of watching Paramount's Clockstoppers in low-res - as we say in French, bof.
This capture shows the basic interface - sort of mac-ified. It looks good, the branding's great.
The content is organized by channels - nothing really special here. But you pick a show to watch, so it's like a big video-on-demand site. It's like the big magical jukebox in the heavens (except that it is not: it's more like the big tuner that only picks up the shitty off-brand knock-off satellite - I mean, no offense but Porto Rican soccer? do they seriously expect a serious soccer fan be interested in that?). I think they are still in demo mode. I'm sure once they're up and running for real, they'll offer to charge us $30 for one evening of Premier League...
The channel navigation is easy and intuitive. There ain't much to navigate though. Big media conglomerates have signed on though - Viacom in particular, hence all the international versions of MTV are available. Yayyyy. And Comedy Central (sans Daily Show, so what is it good for?). It is showing promise though.
I started to watch an old Starsky and Hutch episode. It was sort of bumpy (but I'm on a building-wide wireless connection, so that's to be expected). I also checked out a random CNN documentary on Norway.
There's no CNN live feed. No live feed for that matter - it's more like a big TiVo - except that it's not stuff you chose to record. In the end. that' the main problem. Sure there's all this (legal) content I can stream onto my computer and it looks like TV and... and... well, not much. To me this is kind of a deal breaker. Great idea, but frankly, if I'm gonna watch TV on my computer, I'd rather use my little Miglia HDTV USB connector. With the appropriate software, I can actually use it like a TiVo.
In a way it feels that Joost comes too late. You can't really watch it casually (like TV) - at least not yet. But then again, if you'd like to do that, why not use a USB tv tuner? it's pretty cheap, and will save you a lot of hassles. Now if you want to use Joost as a VOD type of site, they'll really need to beef up their offering before it's of any interest. But I wonder, how will Joost be any different from a trip to the video store, when you don't know what you want to rent? And contrary to the video store, if you get bored you can just click it away and go back to youTube. On top of that, if I want to watch a Pixar movie in HD on my computer, I think I'll buy it from iTunes, of even better, I'll get it from Blockbuster's and rip it (and no, I will not us a Torrent client with a TOR proxy).
I think that Joost misses the mark not so much technologically but philosophically. TV is both immediate and awful. You don't watch most of the stuff on TV. There is a reason for that. But at the same time, TV is a unique medium for its immediacy. Live TV is geared to captivate you - it's not the same as watching a movie or a show. It's something unique. If you can't have that on Joost, then frankly it is of little use, precisely because the rest of the stuff, that is, shows, documentaries, films, etc etc. is mostly uninteresting. It's like the difference between a live soccer match and a recorded one when you know the result. Not as exciting.
Individual consumers are increasingly becoming their own media micro-niches. And the internet empowers them to build their own from the ground up. The days of aimlessly scanning the channel lineup for something , anything are basically over... That is, content producers and advertisers cannot dictate what you will watch as easily. They have lost some of their grip on our eyeballs and minds.
Joost claims it can deliver the lost eyeballs to the big conglomerates. They will let you IM other people who are watching the same thing all over the world. I can see the bull session with the code monkeys and the marketing dorks. TV. Social networking. Yoohoo.
Joost is a great app. It is just too late. Nobody likes TV anymore. TV is so last century. The only time people watch TV is for the FIFA world cup (or other live sporting events), the elections and 9/11. Otherwise, people watch shows, discrete units of content across a range of instruments. And you can't take Joost on your video iPod. So what's the point?
