A Look at Joost
March 9, 2007 | 51 Comments
Jenny recently hooked me up with a much coveted Joost account. Sadly I do not have any invitations yet, and there is a long list of people who have already asked me for one, you know who you are…
I was initially frustrated by the lack of client for MacOS-PPC, since this is the machine running in my living room, hooked to my TV. With that aside, I downloaded the client onto my Windows Vista laptop, where it initially also would not run. Luckily, with Vista all you need to do is jump through a few hoops. Here’s what you do:
- Right click on the shortcut, select properties.
- On the compatibility tab, un-check everything, except “Run as administrator”, this must be checked.
- Then click “Show settings for all users”, and do the same here.
- At this point you should be set to run Joost!
After the initial frustration of getting it running somewhere, I started to appreciate the potential here. In general, it runs pretty smoothly, the quality is surprisingly good for on demand web video. I think it is head and shoulders above the quality of YouTube or Google Video, probably comparable to VHS.
At the moment, the content is a bit limited, although I did watch the Green Day: American Idiot concert, which was very cool. I was extremely happy with the interface. I believe the channel based delivery of content will be familiar and intuitive to the general public who is familiar with cable TV.
My one final complaint would be the advertisement placement. It seems like the software just randomly decides to insert commercials from time to time, which I am OK with, but it doesn’t have any intelligence for deciding when to cut in. For example, I say a stupid Maybelline ad twice, both time in the middle of a song. I think this will work out in time, but just an insiders view of what’s wrong in the beta from my perspective…
Tags: american idiot, google, google video, green day, joost, macosx, Maybelline, television, video, web, windows vista, youtube