Ranting Kenya

Interesting study considering most of the blu-ray players out there are in PS3s, and most of those people didn’t even realize that it was a blu-ray player. I believe HD-DVD is the superior format, though most people don’t know the facts.

PARAMOUNT AND DREAMWORKS ANIMATION EACH DECLARE EXCLUSIVE SUPPORT FOR HD DVD… The companies each said that the decision to distribute exclusively in the HD DVD format resulted from an extensive evaluation of current market offerings, which confirmed the clear benefits of HD DVD, particularly its market-ready technology and lower manufacturing costs.

Bye Bye Blu-ray: Paramount and DreamWorks Animation Go Exclusively HD DVD – Gizmodo

Tags: HD

To clarify this right off the top, I was already accepted to the Halo 3 beta. I did not buy Crackdown for the Halo 3 beta.That said, I did download the demo. And I played it. And it was ok. I ran around, shot some dudes, died a few times, and I didn’t think much of it. Went back to playing Gears of War, Poker, Geometry Wars, College Hoops 2k7 and whatever else I got.

In the following week or so, I noticed some people on my friends list playing Crackdown. Of course I had heard more about the game itself from Major’s podcast and other web sources. So I went back to the demo, and I tried leveling up. This is where Microsoft made me buy Crackdown, this whole downloading the demo thing is perfectly evil.

Before I knew it, I was jumping from rooftop to rooftop, throwing propane tanks, jumping cars, basically having a blast. One of my “things” about video games is I like to play games when I’m doing things I wouldn’t normally do. That means, I like sports games, but I really like shooting people. Well Crackdown I like a lucid dream. You jump super high and throw cars, neither of which I’ve done in real life.

And then they add character leveling. So I’m leveling up as I go. Now I have the RPG hook in a shooting game. Very hard to put down. This is the first game in a while that I’ve played where late night fatigue is less important than playing “just 10 more minutes”. I’ve had two late nights in a row now, just like back in the day.

They say that first impressions are what really matter. Joost is proving that second look doesn’t hurt either.

After my initial post on Joost, I went back to the program and dug a little deeper. There are a number of other excellent features. There’s some really slick plugins that you can overlay on top of the video.

The one that I really like is the “News Ticker”. It’s really just an rss feed display. It’s small and not distracting at all, to my surprise. Usually any sort of video overlay distracts me entirely. You can only view the plugins when you’re watching Joost in full-screen mode. That may be why I’m not distracted by it. It cycles through all the rss feeds one by one, and one entry at a time. You have to copy and paste the rss URL into the program manually, so the usability could be improved a bit. Nevertheless, the functionality is there.

It also has channel chat rooms that you can join as guest. It allows viewers of a channel to discuss topics while watching the video. A unique idea indeed. I wonder if future versions will have a feature more like a regular message board, so that comments can be viewed at a later time by other users. Maybe a most discussed link comes up first… digg-style?

You can also overlay a chat application that runs on either the jabber or gtalk network. Particularly handy if you want to talk to your friends but still watch tv. Basically an alternative to watching TV in bed with a laptop.

The more I watch it though, the more I would like to see more content. I’m sure once the service is up, and enough users are on board, finding new content won’t be as difficult. It is in the project road map to add content. Basically, I can’t wait.

I’ve been lucky enough to be included in the beta test for Joost. Joost is an online streaming TV application created by the guys who did Kazaa and Skype. If you could say one thing about those two guys, I’d mirror what Molly Wood said (editor at CNet and Buzz Out Loud podcast host). I don’t remember the exact words but it was something to the effect of

“They took file sharing and made it easy. Then they took VOIP and made it accessible.”

And now here’s Joost. Sure ABC has dabbled in online TV. NBC has ordered clips removed from youtube. But this is a whole different animal. These are not videos of your buddies blowing up propane tanks in a fire, or episodes of Lost (not available online in Canada, but good start anyway), this is a channel surfing machine. Everything feels like an actual TV feed on your computer. The quality is on par with regular TV on a PC, but looks a little better to me (and some channels are better than others). You have a guide you can surf, a search box to exploit, and only a few seconds of buffering between channels. Joost is unlike any other video site/application that I have ever used.

But what about the content? After all, it’s content is king right? Well, I don’t know what the plans are for the content, but as of right now I’d say it’s not bad considering it’s currently a beta. Just under 30 channels on my last count. Surprisingly to me there are shows from Much Music (basically Canadian MTV that still plays some music videos). I also watched some car driving test from the UK, and even the World Poker Tour. I believe if Joost can grab some more common TV content (smaller network content perhaps like Spike, G4, Space Network, Teletoon, Comedy Network etc), this thing will explode. The web will forever be changed. Noticing a theme with these two fellows?

I’ve only played in it for about 10 minutes. But seriously, this is going to be big.