A non-politics techie post at last!
Online TV service Joost (also at joost.com) opened up it’s doors to a few more people recently, and I managed to wangle an invite to see the service for myself. For the non-geeky readers, Joost is an internet based TV service. It runs on your computer, streaming content down from the Joost servers, and is from the guys behind Skype.
As I type this, I have a World Poker Tour channel playing in a window. There are something like 20 channels available, with something for most tastes. Certainly nothing but stuff you’d generally find on the channels you flick past on satellite TV, but right now it’s less about content and more about whether it works and scales for larger user bases.
It’s also an interesting user interface. Quite intuitive, and not drawing on the common features in the host Operating System (Mac OS X in my case), which enables them to presumably make it a common experience for all users. It’s all big text and graphics, with clear text and simple choices. Choose your channel, setup your widgets, and watch the TV you choose.
Of course it’ll do nothing to help reduce my bandwidth usage, which last month was only a few megabytes short of needing topping up. I use a lot given I remote work, even before I download television! 
I have a TV tuner available on my computer, so I can watch all the terrestrial freeview channels, but still think Joost could be very big indeed. They’ve certainly managed they ‘hype’ around it very well, so people are craving an invite to try it, so it’s going to be a success.
If they manage to build a platform for pushing out television content to computers (with, of course, advertising), it could become the first global television service and add a further interesting dynamic to broadcast media, which is grappling with HDTV, digital broadcast, and online service integration. Interesting times indeed!
Drop me a note or post a comment if you’d like an invite to try it out for yourself.
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