blog@osd.se

(This post is based on the content available in Sweden. We don’t get Comedy Central, for example.)

A couple of days ago I got myself a Joost beta invite from GigaOM, so I’ve been testing it out a bit. To start with, I miss sitting in the sofa and relaxing, because my chair isn’t nearly as comfortable as my sofa. I do have a computer hooked to my TV, but that computer runs Ubuntu and I have no plans to change that – at least not just to run Joost. There is a a Linux client planned for Joost, but it’s not yet available. Also, I think Joost gives you a better experience if you have a mouse to control the application with. Even if the available keyboard shortcuts worked well, they didn’t quite cover all my needs. I also missed the relaxing part with TV; just watching and letting someone else decide what to show. Being able to chose between lots of material is not the same as only having a bunch of channels to switch between, but I guess that’s what Joost wants to change too.

Something that they seem to have added more of lately is ads. Not like commercials on TV, but very short ones, lasting just a couple of seconds between the shows. Saying things like “brought to you by hp.com” while showing a blue screen with a hp logo on. There is also this small box popping up in the lower right corner every now and then. I’ve seen a couple of different company logos there and you can actually click the box and it seem to be a ordinary hyper link which opens in your browser.

I watched for a while, but besides some music videos, I didn’t find a lot of material that was interesting to me. Often what seemed to be a interesting program when reading about it, turned out to be a five year old crappy talk show clip, and it was harding knowing what was old and what was new. To guess that “Episode 152″ is older than “Episode 160″ is fairly obvious, but there’s nothing that tells you if it was recorded 1999 or 2006. I couldn’t find any interesting TV shows or movies that I’d like to watch (except possibly Fifth Gear). However, if you do like Lassie, Poker, Indy 500, MTV-like shows, silent movies, fighting and soccer, there’s stuff for you to watch. Unfortunately, I don’t really like any of those.

One should keep in mind that this is a beta version. I hope they add a lot of more content before release, because it’s needed. Rumors say that a release is close, so I hope for their sake that they have time to do it before that. (Their financial part seem to be working at least, because they recently announced a $45 million funding from various companies.)

Unfortunately the content isn’t Joost’s only problem. When I started watching today, some (old) Fifth Gear episodes, it wasn’t smooth at all. The download speed wasn’t fast enough (I have a 10Mbit/s connection and wasn’t using it for anything else at the time), so it couldn’t fill its buffer to deliver smooth sound and video. It kept skipping for the first few minutes or so, then it got better for about ten minutes, and then the skipping started again and continued until I decided it wasn’t worth watching. To start with, I wish they would have used a larger buffer so it would download more data between the buffer underruns. The pauses would of course last longer then, but I think it would have been a better experience. NewTeeVee reports about infrastructure problems with P2P and it could indeed be related to my own problems today. It will be interesting to see how this develop, because the hype in its own will probably keep Joost alive, at least for a while after the launch.

If you want an invite anyway, just let me know.