Joost Beta!

Some months ago I applied for the beta of Joost (also known as Project Venice) and yesterday I received the invitation.

Joost™

I installed the application and I did some test, and I have to admit that it seems working quite fine; sometime it is slow and I need some buffering, and the errors management is still rough, but Joost is really able to deliver TV on demand directly from your broadband. The number of channels available is still limited, but I think it will grow fast when the application will come out of beta: I expect nothing more than a success from the mind behind Kazaa and Skype. By The Way: all the available channels are FREE!

My home broadband has still a lot of problems, mainly caused by the great distance from the local exchange in Poplar, so the speed is quite slow, but it seems enough to support the max download of 320MB for a 45 minutes episode. Probably when the HD films will be available my connection will not be enough, but for the moment is it fine.

Sometimes you get some ads in the episode you are watching, ads that cannot be skipped, but you get some free and legal contents, so here’s the deal. One thing that is a little awkward: while the episode you are watching sometime froze, probably buffering, the ads are prefect, in a perfect definition, and fluid… Should I repeat that all the contents are Free????

The contents cannot be saved locally and, as far as I have been able to understand, it’s not possible to buffer a complete episode in order to watch it fluidly. Obviously I have played around with it few minutes, so I cannot guarantee you that this limitation is real or that there are more things to come with the final release, but I decided to try to use Joost as a real final user, trying not to play around too much with the configurations.

The menu doesn’t show me any invitation left, maybe I will give you some more information if I will have some!