After couple months of waiting, I finally got my hands on trying out Joost. I must admit I have been following Joost or formerly known as The Venice Project for quite sometime, perhaps due to the buzz surrounding it. I have seen the screen shot and read their articles, in fact you could say I was quite prepared to be dazzle by what Joost had to offer.

The entire download and installation process of Joost is very straightforward and didn’t take long just like Hiitch. ;) However my initial run of Joost was immediately greeted with problems, the loading of the channel seems to take forever. I have to restart Joost a few times to get connected to one of their programmes. The image quality is fairly decent for an online tv but the programme selection, limited. I understand they are in the process of acquiring additional content with other media companies. Aside from some unexpected UI behavior, the only complain I had is that the video screen get buried by other application or windows when you switched away from it. Joost could really use a feature like “Always on Top” to toggle the screen so that I can check my email and still not miss the show.

Overall Joost is a good application with a brilliant concept but not an excellent one yet. It needs a better UI interface, spoilt for choice channel selection, solid image quality and tons of networking features to really pull audience away from their normal goggle box.

The idea of online TV utilizing peer-to-peer technology to stream programme to your computer is nothing new, take for example the chinese software TVants and PPstream. Both downloadable video playback application offer more channels and programmes to choose from. However the social features for such application remains largely untapped. Joost is definitely heading the right direction by including features like chat, instant messaging and rating system into their application. I simply love the idea that you can chat with other user while watching the same programme.

Likewise, peer-to-peer communication tool has been around for the longest time but none of them offer very comprehensive social networking features. I like to think of Hiitch as a very simple communication tool with tons of wonderful social networking features built onto it. Who knows maybe in the future we may just include our own tv network into Hiitch.

Tags: communication, Joost, Others, peer to peer, PPStream, social networking, The Venice Project, TVants

Filed under: Others by Adam Soh |

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 @ 3:15 pm on the category Others .
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