For the last 3 remaining people in the universe who have not yet received a Joost invite: I have now got one. Nah-nah-na-na-nah.
Joost uses peer-to-peer technology, similarly to BitTorrent, to distribute copy-protected broadcast TV between users. It’s very simple to set up and you don’t need to tweak any settings to make it work perfectly. There are about 12 channels available with a choice of about 20 programmes on each channel. The video quality is very good compared to YouTube and similar — and probably better than regular TV if you sit 20 inches from the screen, the way you do with a computer. They make their money from short adverts every 10 minutes or so. Just a single advert, but presumably, because they have virtually no costs and highly targeted audiences, they can make a reasonable profit on these.
But it kind of reminds me why I don’t watch regular TV. The content they’ve managed to pull together appears to be a compilation of Channel 5 rejects (Channel 5 is the worst British TV station, overseas readers). There’s a whole channel of ‘The World’s Strongest Man’ and another devoted to a car programme that isn’t as good as Top Gear. I started watching the promisingly-titled ‘Indie Flix’ channel, but found that by ‘indie’ they really meant ‘unwatchable tripe’. Fratelli-TV, if you like.
There’s talk of a further deal between Viacom and Joost, which already has an MTV channel from the company. Viacom recently had 100,000 video clips pulled from YouTube. Hopefully, that content is about to find a new home and fingers-crossed that might give me the incentive to try it a second time.
Update: Stuart was clearly in the same batch of new testers as me and shares my feelings. Some salutary comments from Duncan to counter my impatience below.
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Can I have one?
Remember Joost is in beta for the foreseeable future so it doesn’t make economic sense for them to release large amounts of content for the fairly small number of beta users. There’s a quote from one of the developers on the forums; “Remember Joost is still a technology BETA so you are testing the functionality of the client and Joosts back end systems not the content”.
They reckon it’ll release properly in June/July, I must admit I’ve run out of decent content to watch on it!
@Simon. I haven’t got one. They used to give out mates’ invites, but now they don’t.
@Duncan. Fair point. I am duly chastened. So it probably *is* Channel 5 reject material.
@Duncan, the problem is without content why would you want to bother testing it for them. Beta testing is the customer doing free R&D for the developer. In this case Joost offers no incentive for you to test anything for them. I’ve installed it and definitely won’t use it again until there is something to watch.
@Stuart. There are very few beta services which offer anything approaching a full service in terms of usability and content, I’m not going to hold it against them for this, as I’ve said it would be commercial suicide to sign deals for major content with less than a six figure audience to sell to advertisers. Very true, the customer is doing free R&D, a great number of start-up companies could not get on the road map without this valuable community support. There is no need for Joost or any other start-up to offer incentives, indeed I’ve never taken part in any beta where this is the case. There are enough people on the internet with interest in such products to be sure of a varied and representative beta group.
@Ian. Your right, certainly I doubt Top Gear has lost any audience to Fifth Gear! If only the BBC would get on board instead of pursuing the iPlayer.
Duncan, I suppose the difficulty is that in the case of Joost, the service *is* the content. Beta testing something like gmail is quite different because you can do productive things with it and that’s an incentive in itself. Once you’ve worked out how to play programmes, your technical beta test of Joost has pretty much finished.
Ian, is this something they plan to make available for free?
Even though in the case of Joost the service is indeed the content, I believe there is still much to be gained by beta testing. Thanks to all the attention that Joost has received, there are lots of geeks who will try to break the system without regard to the content. Certainly good content would increase the number of beta testers, but I suspect that Joost already has the number it needs. Having good content might even be detrimental, as a beta tester might then be more likely to miss, or forgive, technical faults in the system.
@Stephan, I believe the model is selling ads for revenue. However, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of premium channels and so forth (that’s just speculation on my part).
@Rohan. Welcome back! From the company’s perspective, you’re quite right. Maybe the most ‘active’ beta testers are those who want to ‘test’ it in a darker way — I am sure Joost ad blockers and Joost video downloaders are in the works somewhere.
Damn.….got my invite this morning and was beginning to feel bit special. So what exactly does the word ‘beta’ mean now?
The same as the word “special” in current UK slang? [very un-politically-correct but pleasingly ironic description of those unable to keep up. cf. special school, special child, special bus]
maybe .… it’s like that old M&S line; “exclusively for everyone”.
Quick correction: Mates’ invites are not off. I was given two tokens, which I gave to Simon and Stephan above.
Received with thanks!
…
there are so many ‘channel 5’s’ here…
it seems the content will improve based on recent news but.. its almost unbearable to test this way.