Daily Cup of Tech

As a student and one who doesn’t personally see the point of paying for 200+ channels only to sit and wonder why I’m paying for 200+ channels when I only occasionally find something interesting on the Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Sci-Fi, Discovery, History, A&E and maybe a few others, I was surprised when I found myself interested in Joost. Maybe it’s just because I’m a computer geek that sometimes will dream of writing code (that’s for another story) and the idea of having something besides music or The 5th Element to entertain myself while I work thrills me to no end. It’s not like I have nothing to distract myself what with Fark and the whole HD-DVD key fiasco that went on not too long ago on Digg. The idea of television over the Interwebs is nothing new but it’s exciting to have it in a way that is higher quality from actual network sources and not some server pushing out ripped episodes from parent’s basement. And then I got an invite.

First, Joost is in beta. Just remember that.

After reading all the fine print of the privacy policy and glancing over the TOS (so that I didn’t accidentally swear away my children before they’re even born), I installed the client. Yes, you have to have an invite and it’s my understanding that beta testers do get unlimited invites but testers have to participate in the feedback process before they can invite anyone. The install was smooth and relatively quick and painless. The installer tests to see if you can run it and I passed even though I’m barely in the ballpark with 512 meg RAM.

The first time you start Joost, it asks you for your login or walks you through creating an account. The appearance is very nice and rich with colors that aren’t obtrusive. It sports a relatively intuitive interface with smooth lines and popup tips.

Since it’s in beta, I didn’t expect too many channels but to my surprise, there are programs from the Comedy Channel, MTV, VH1, National Geographic, Nickelodeon and many more. Right now, the channel catalog is teasing me with the Transformer and GI Joe channels however there are no shows listed there yet. There is a strictly anime and Manga channel (Gong) and there is a sci-fi channel called “Alliance Atlantis.” I’m excited to see that the preview thumbnail of Alliance Atlantis shows a screen cap of Lexx but the channel is empty so far (thus dashing my hopes upon the rocks of despair).

Each channel lists four current shows when you click on it but you have to add it to “My Channels” to browse all the shows in that feed. And to make things easier, there’s a search function that lists possible matches sorted by relevance. There’s also a “quick links” type of section where new channels and popular picks can be quickly browsed.

While you’re actually watching a show, you can click the display once (sometimes twice - but don’t double click as that changes from full screen to window mode and vice versa) to bring up a slick menu for controls. Click again to hide them. You can pause and channel surf as well as “show surf” like tracks in a music playlist. There’s also a seek bar so you can skip to whatever point you want during the show.

If you get confused, there’s a quick help button that will pop a menu of major commands and how to use them.

I have to say that I’m impressed with the quality. It’s not DVD quality. Right now I’m paused on something called “SoNoTORIous - Plucky” and while I can’t see each hair on the guy’s head like I can on a DVD, it’s certainly better than TV quality. During high computer usage or network congestion, quality will sometimes drop but no worse than medium quality internet videos. Some sound is only in stereo while other parts seem to be full surround.

There are commercials but they are surprisingly short, much less than the 30+ second spots on television.

Joost seems very stable for being a beta release. It did crash on me once in the first 5 minutes but its crash reporter popped up and sent a report to Joost. I’ve also had a couple “disconnects” but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s due to my Internet connection (1.5 MBPS DSL). I do have a wired connection and I’m not sure that wireless would do as well, especially if you wanted to use this with a wireless entertainment system.

The Joost player sits in your system tray (”notification area” if you’re using Windows XP). If you’re confused by what that means, just know that it puts an icon next to your clock. It also has a taskbar button and tends to not really close but goes into “standby” mode (you can turn this off). It handles multi-monitor environments very well and also takes advantage of hyperthreading as I’ve seen it hit resources on both “CPUs” of my 3.4 GHz P4 Extreme (if you want the details, it hit 70% CPU usage as reported by Task Manager which indicates that it is using multiple cores). While the system requirements say it should have 512 meg memory, it seems to do reasonably well while I’m programming in Java (which only leaves it about 384 meg). I have noticed a few skips here and there but mostly when I try to multitask too many things while Joost is playing. The pause feature is useful for that.

In the “My Joost” area of the program, there are invites, channel chat and a notice saying that in the future there will be widgets that users can create and add. So far, I see the following widgets:
News Ticker, Instant Messaging, Clock, Invites, Rate It, Channel Chat, an advanced settings area (with parental controls), and a Notice Board.

All in all, I have to say it’s a very promising and incredible system for a beta service. Joost is promising all this for free and it seems like quite a deal.

I don’t have any invites yet but I will soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh look, the Circus Channel… wow.

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