Joost: iTV or Internet TV — a quick first look

Karl Marx called religion the ‘opium of the people’. Modern media pundits have ripped that quote, calling television the ‘opiate of the masses’.

I wonder what they’re going to make of Joost.

On first blush, it’s streaming TV for the broadband-connected PC — internet TV if you will. Pick your channel and watch. Simple, just like traditional TV. Cool.

But wait, what’s this interactive and social stuff, iTV? My old Electrohome didn’t have that.

Ah, Plug-ins. I get it. TV for Web 2.0. iTV and internet TV.
Do I detect a possible open architecture with a developer API in the near future? That would be sweet. As it is, Joost arrives on your desktop with an unobtrusive instant messaging box (Jabber / Google Chat compliant). Customizable News feeds (via RSS). And hey, you can chat in real-time with other Joost users watching the same show. There are more plugins, but I should move on.
Channel Selection. For now, pretty limited. Music videos (Nettwerk and Much Music content, documentaries, and documentaries about musicians). But some of the names (Warner Music) lead me to believe that you’ll see more headline-quality content available as the service matures.

Advertising. Yep, there’s a 3-5 sec advert before some content. Very minor.

Quality. Your mileage may vary. On my standard gaming PC with most of the background processes turned off, I got between 19-25 frames / sec (measured with FRAPS) in fullscreen mode. Picture quality was not as good as DIVX, though acceptable. Audio was great. Nary a pause or dropout in the stream, though I’m anticipating a bit of a hit on bandwidth (if you’re bandwidth capped, be warned, Joost could easily eat your bandwidth).

As with anything, once the basic technology is in place, it’s the content (commercial and otherwise) that will make this service, and perhaps the interaction amongst the audience.

I’m going to keep checking it out though…this was a first impression only, so I’m sure I have more research to do

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