Joost Goes Public: Comment

We’ve been watching Joost since the days it was The Venice Project.

Well yesterday it left its invite-only beta stage, opening up for all to sign up. Given the large interest we saw in people wanting to sign up for the Joost beta when we offered it, we imagine that the take-up will be strong.

As you’ll know it’s a software-based IP TV service setup by the bods behind Kazza and Skype.

Over the while the Joost Beta has been running it’s gradually increased not only the content that it’s been offering, but the features and functions of the service, as we covered back in September.

At public beta launch Joost has over 250 ‘channels’ and 15,000 programmes – a pretty strong offering for those who haven’t seen it grow. Essentially it’s equivalent to a free satellite TV service on your PC.

How Will It Fare With Increased Users?
It will be interesting to see if the performance of Joost suffers as the masses signup for the service.

As more people join, it should, in theory, actually get better as it uses each of the computers running it (P2P) to distribute the videos, once the Joost servers have seeded them.

We suspect that there’ll be a few nail-biting days at Joost central while they prove the theory.

Joost Verses The Competition
Where software like Joost could well win over single-platform only services like the BBC iPlayer (It’s needs Windows top to bottom), is that as it evolves, it could become embedded into hardware, as the founders did with Skype.

Once embedded it will be on the TV where the mass of the population is comfortable watching video content, not suffering from having to be on computer.

One problem that hasn’t been addressed yet is, in a world of many P2P applications running on computers, how long will it be before the computers owners say, “enough” and stop sharing bandwidth and processors with uncle Tom Cobbly and all.

Joost