Joost Mini-Review
So I was recently given a download from the Joost beta team. I was interested because I had heard some good (and some bad to be frank) things about it. I’ve heard talk about it being the “next big thing” or something. It seems that folks who are saying that have not tried it — while on 1.5Mbps cable.
I love the idea of getting TV over the internet, when you want it. We have not had a traditional TV set for over a year now I believe. Contrary to what some may think, we haven’t died missing out on American Idol or Are you as smart as a first grader? or whatever the “cool” shows are on prime-time nowadays. I am a nerd, I want to see nerdy things. I don’t want to have to watch 30 minutes of commercials just to see 30 minutes of actual programming. So we have gone without for awhile. iTunes has Stargate Atlantis (which isn’t always up to date, but whatever) and any other stuff we want to see usually shows up on Netflix.
I’ll not be long-winded for much longer, I promise. I installed Joost and went immediately to the National Geographic channel. And waited. And waited. After a bit more waiting, it skipped back to another program — the one I had selected before but decided to go past. So, it is beta, I’ll let a little slide. But the buffering is just not smart enough to use daily for me. It is constantly stuttering and the only way to stop it is to pause the program and wait (and keep waiting because there is no indicator that I can see to show you how much is buffered).
The other annoying thing is that you get seemingly random commercial breaks. I will give them points for making them small for now. But you have to wait for the commercials to load. So the process of commercials goes a little something like this:
- Watch programming (pausing every minute or so to buffer more without stuttering)
- See black screen randomly and wait 30-60 seconds (I presume this is the commercial downloading)
- Watch commercial (thankfully this isn’t too long)
- Programming seems to return almost immediately (big plus for that at least)
Also odd is the frequency of commercials. On one channel (say Off the Fence Docs) there are almost no commercials, but on another (say National Geographic) they seem to show up every 10 minutes or so. My only guess is that commercials may be up to the content owners?
So the final annoyance I found was that of the 5 or 6 different programs (on different channels as well) ALL of them, after awhile of watching, stopped suddenly and gave me a dialog saying something along the lines of “Sorry, but this program can’t be played right now. Check something else out. Error Number 121″ This is the ultimate annoyance. You are watching something and maybe 3/4 of the way in, it just says, “Oops, sorry, later punk”. I am not sure if this means that their aren’t enough peers to get the video from or what. The network seems to push uploads of around 10-25Kbps when watching programming, but the download really varies, going from nothing up to 70Kbps or so with some peaks a bit higher.
So overall, Joost seems like a neat idea. I am betting it will be a lot nicer for folks with high upload and download speeds (5Mbps/1Mbps), assuming that more people pick it up to increase the download speeds. But we’ll see how it shapes up over the next few releases. I am sure it’s not easy to get peer-to-peer TV to work well, but they are getting there hopefully. I really want Joost to succeed.
Will I use Joost regularly? Probably not. But it’s looking very promising.