Joost Software Review

Software Reveiw: Joost Beta from the makers of Skype and Kazaa

Joost is a program that lets you watch TV shows. And no , its not another internet video stream program, this is real TV. CBS, National Geographic, BET, MTV, IndieFlix, to name a few. (If you want an invite, send me your e-mail and I'll give you one)

How it works: Joost uses P2P technology. You get content from the Joost servers (The original seeders), as well as from other users watching shows on Joost. As you watch content on Joost it is saved in a cache and Joost uploads from that cache to others as you watch TV. You never have the entire file downloaded on your computer at any one time, so that prevents people from stealing content, which is why big TV companies have added their shows to Joost.

The upside: There is almost no buffering. Watching Joost is the same as watching regular Television, and as more people join the network, it will only get better. The other really cool thing is the widgets. You can can use the chat widget to talk with other users watching your channel, a clock widget to keep track of what time it is, news feed, and a "blog this" widget to send a screen and post to the blog client of your choice. You can also use 3rd party widgets. Yep, fans can make widgets for Joost and put them up for others to download, and thats going to really make Joost a good program.

The downside: Joost can use up your bandwidth, which shouldn't be a problem for people with high speed internet, but if your ISP has bandwidth limits or charges by how much bandwidth you use instead of a flat fee, then Joost may not be a good program to use. Another small problem is the cache. It can take up to 2 GB of memory on your hard drive, and if you don't have the free space that can be a problem. Currently Joost has no way to allow user control of the cache (the program IS still in beta though...) but on a windows computer if you want to delete files from the Joost cache you can find it at:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Joost

The interface: At first it was a little confusing to figure out. The interface is not intuitive. But I think as it gets worked on, that will get better.

If you click once on the screen, the main controls pop up at the bottom, channel catalog is on the left, My Joost (The widget interface) is on the right and at the top is "extra features" which consist of channel information and ad links. It can be a little annoying though because the menu disappears and reappears when you don't want it to. You can see screenshots below:



Advertisements: The advertisements come in the form of small pop ups in the corner of the screen and 15 second commercials once every hour or so. They aren't intrusive and overall Joost is a very nice way to watch TV, better than traditional television by far.

System Requirements:

Windows System requirements

Joost runs well on most modern PCs equipped with the latest updates to the Windows operating system. Recommended minimum specifications are as follows:

* Windows XP Service Pack 2 with DirectX 9.0c
* Pentium 4 processor, 1 GHz
* 512 MB or more RAM
* A modern video card with DirectX support and at least 32 MB of VRAM
* About 500 MB free disk space
* The Joost software is a 10 MB download, expanding to 30-35 MB on disk. The remainder is used as a cache

* Broadband/ADSL (1 Mbit/s downstream, 512 Kbit/s upstream recommended, although lower speeds may well work)
* 1 hour of viewing is 320 Megabytes downloaded and 105 Megabytes uploaded, which means that a 1 GB cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours

Mac OS X System requirements

Currently, Joost runs only on the latest Macintosh computers equipped with Intel processors. Recommended minimum specifications are as follows:

* Any Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.4
* 512 MB or more RAM
* About 500 MB free disk space
* The Joost software is a 13 MB download, expanding to 30-35 MB on disk. The remainder is used as a cache

* Broadband/ADSL (1 Mbit/s downstream, 512 Kbit/s upstream recommended, although lower speeds may well work)
* In 1 hour of viewing, 320 MB will be downloaded and 105 MB uploaded, which means that a 1 GB cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours

Presentation on the Joost network given by Colm MacCarthaigh at INEX