Jay invited me to the Joost beta program. And since my nice “Philips 37 LCD Ambilight 2 decided to die 2 nights ago, it’s wonderful to have something to watch.
First, it’s pretty cool. Jay was sitting on my couch last night connected to an open WiFi node and the performance was unacceptable. This was a statement about the open wifi performance and not Joost. Joost runs perfectly over my 802.11b home network that has 2 Macs, a TiVO and a infrequently connected PC. The network streaming performance was great. The experience was similar to watching digital cable on Rogers. Occasionally the show would pause for a second, but generally it was like watching television. The Joost guys have done a great job.
The channels range for wonderful to hysterical. National Geographic. Top Gear. Explora. Off the Fence – Docs on Demand. Fantastic, and now that my TiVO is connected using Toast 8 I don’t even really need a TV. Then there is the humour, the Diddy Channel. All Diddy all the time.
The beta still has some bugs. Both performance and user experience. It took me a while to figure out that title bar in a Channel view works like navigation back button. The physical separateness of the title bar and the show list I found confusing. There are a lot of menu items that are repeated. Overall Joost is pretty cool. I can’t wait for more content!