Joost Still Working Out the Kinks in Beta

I spent some time last weekend watching Joost, the new (and much-hyped) Internet video service from Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. I came away with a (mostly) good impression, but noticed some basic problems that still need work.

Joost is in "limited" beta right now, which means you have to receive an invitation from the company or a current Joost user to download the application and start watching.

The first question I had about Joost concerned the look of the video itself, which its creators claim is "broadcast quality." I found Joost to be something less than broadcast quality much of the time.

Services like Joost are inevitably dependant on the speed of the user's broadband connection. Using my 1 Mb/sec DSL connection, the Joost video looked clean and performed reliably during times of low Internet traffic -- like very early Sunday morning. When traffic levels were high, like on Friday evening, Joost's picture often looked pixilated, and the stream cut off completely on several occasions.

I was impressed with the breadth of Joost's channel line up, which includes content from VH1, National Geographic and, soon, CBS.

However much of the video Big Media has made available at Joost so far isn't exactly prime-time stuff. For instance, the Comedy Central channel features 18 episodes of three shows: Freakshow, Dog Bites Man and Stella. I also saw many "special interest" and regional channels like "Bite TV", "BoomChicago" and "IndyCar Series".

Not that there's anything wrong with more specialized, non-prime time shows. That type of "long tail" programming, if there's enough to choose from, might prove to be the real niche of Internet video. I admit to watching several of the seven Ren and Stimpy (Nickelodeon) episodes available at Joost. I also found most of the 10 or so (older) National Geographic shows to be worth watching.

Research shows that TV viewers' main problem is this: "What do I watch when I don't know what to watch?" I give Joost kudos for providing several tools to help answer that question. You can use a key word search to find content you like. Your Joost-watching friends can invite you to watch, rate and chat about new shows in real time. Below is a screen grab of the "My Joost" page, where Joosters find their IM, invite, show rating and other "interactive" tools.

At Joost, the term "channel" means something different than it does in the cable TV world. Joost channels are just groupings of on-demand videos, the content of which is related in some way. For instance, there is a "Lassie" channel, and one called "Joost Suggests." Once you choose a channel from the Main Channel Menu, a show menu appears:

The screen shot below shows the Joost interface you see while watching a show. Actually, the graphics around the video appear only when you first select the show or after you move the mouse; they fade away neatly when you're done with them.

The graphic at the top shows you what channel you're watching. Once it's clicked, more information about the channel appears on the screen. The dashboard at the bottom is used to select and navigate through the video or move on to the next show in the channel. "My Channels" is a list of the channels you've told Joost you like.

I also noticed that Joost has already begun running advertisements in the beta version of the service. The ads usually consist of a short banner ad at the beginning of a show, then a single 10-30 second video ad every 20 minutes or so during the show. The ads don't last long enough to be annoying, however.

Joost, like Kazaa and Skype before it, relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to distribute video. P2P networks typically cache small bits of content (in this case video) on the hard drives of end users to help speed the delivery of video to users nearby. So, in theory at least, as more people begin using Joost the video packets will be delivered faster and more reliably. We'll check in with Joost again after it graduates from beta.