Ranting Kenya

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.