Joost Invitation Drawing
I have one Joost invite left. In order to get to know you better, I am holding a fun little drawing for it. All you have to do is introduce yourself in the comments below.
What do you do for a living? Are you a student, or a 9 to 5er? Where are you from? Write a little bit about your hobbies or interests. One person will be randomly selected from all the comments posted by the end of Monday, April 30th. The winner will be announced on next Tuesday’s post and the invitation sent out that evening. Good luck!
Joost from an HTPC Geek’s View
Today’s guest post comes from Peter Lowe, a self-proclaimed Home Theater Personal Computer geek who looked deeper into Joost and how well it interacts with his HTPC setup. Thanks Peter!
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Joost: First Impressions
I just got invited to the Joost beta. I’d been looking forward to trying it, as I’m a bit of a HTPC geek, and I was curious to see how their take on IPTV would integrate into my setup.
So far, it doesn’t.
Like most people, I watch TV with a remote. I also use a computer for recording and PVR functions, but ultimately it’s still me with the remote in front of the TV screen. Joost’s interface simply doesn’t lend itself to control in this way. You absolutely need a mouse, or some kind of pointing device. I’m not sure if this is a shortcoming of the interface, or simply a consequence of the added functions, but the result is the same. So, right off, Joost disrupts my usual TV experience. Another problem is the text in the interface. Like most computer text, its difficult to read on a standard definition TV. It feels like Joost is herding me to watch its content on my monitor, using the standard computer controls, which seems odd for a TV service. It might be a different story on a high definition screen with a Wiimote, but I have neither.
Service was the other problem. As I surfed through the various channels available, the only thing I could find to watch that looked interesting was some National Geographic channel shows; the very-limited remaining selection was simply uninteresting. When I tried out a few of the National Geographic shows, the connection was so choppy that the shows were unwatchable. Now, I have just started using this, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve misconfigured it, but for now, it’s basically useless.
I will investigate further, both to see if I’ve misconfigured the program (and, if so, I will certainly take another look at the service quality for you), and to see if any more content is forthcoming. The interface and integration issues I’m seeing seem ingrained in the platform, which leaves Joost as an interesting toy I might run occasionally when I’m at my desk, but unlikely to change anything for my TV viewing habits, and certainly not a revolution in TV content delivery. Three yawns.
Related links:
Guest Post about Joost (pending)
I have a guest post coming in from a Home Theater/PC fan, for a different perspective on Joost. Look for it on Tuesday!
Related links:
April is Financial Literacy Month
Bah to all this blabber about taxes. I hate taxes. I know how to file my taxes. What I and many others do not have is the bigger picture: how to handle one’s finances. I stumbled along on my own, learning by getting burned by the fire and skinning a few of my knees skinning my knees a few times until I entered college, where the money thing gets serious. Ever since I have made an effort to educate myself on how money works [for and against me].
So to do my part, I’m listing a few places I like to visit.
Get Rich Slowly – I’ve fallen for my fair share of get rich quick schemes thanks to parents who do not have a handle on their finances. The idea of getting rich slowly was positively revolutionary to me because I had never considered it. As a kid, I thought one was either born rich or became rich in an instant (a la Powerball, becoming famous, etc). J.D. Roth walks his readers through the past financial mistakes he has made and his current financial struggles, all the while sprinkling the path to a stable financial future with good books to read and multiple online resources to expand everyone’s financial literacy.
Make Love, Not Debt – Him and Her are preparing to get married, and their current net worth (as of this month) is -$60,964.42. Him and Her offer candid posts about their relationship with each other and their combined finances. I have found some good suggestions on how to handle my relationship and finances from Him and Her’s stories.
Generation X Finance – Lots of good information targeted at Generation X in particular, but also plenty of general financial information for everyone else. Jeremy does a great job of responding to e-mails, too. I had a particular question dealing with my 401(k) that I could not find answers to, and he responded with helpful advice and pointed me towards more resources where I could do my own research.
Make your financial education a little less painful. Learn by example, not by mistake. If I learned anything, it is that learning by mistakes made is a horrible, painful route!
Joost Critique (for version 0.9.1)
This is my extended review. You can find the short critique here.
User Experience
If I ever receive permission, I’ll post some screen shots.
I received an invitation last week to try out Joost. I read the minimum system requirements and then completed a quick and painless install. I immediately noticed the user interface had some very Mac-like/OS X-ish characteristics.
The UI felt natural. I guessed at what something would do, and my expectations were met. Mouse over to the edge of the viewing panel and new options would come up: My Channels, My Joost, and a status panel describing the channel name, program name, and simple icons to control everything (change the channel, change the show playing on the channel, pause/play the show, fiddle with the volume, slide the play bar to rewind and fast forward, turn off the power button to exit Joost). When you were done, clicking anywhere off of the floating windows moved them out of sight.
There is a subtle, unobtrusive tone to the design of the widgets and menu options: floating, semi-transparent windows, (with their fluid animations and minimal sizes) meant I could open several widgets and run them on the screen without it becoming a real distraction.
Unfortunately, when it came to actually watching a show, I was then thoroughly disappointed for the next three hours. Shows would start, play for ten or fifteen minutes, then stop. If it could not play or restart your show, you would be automatically redirected to a new show. It took a few times before I realized this was an undocumented “feature” rather than a bug.
I read comments by other users in the support forum that Joost uses a combination of P2P and streaming video, and decided to let my computer run overnight with it on. I figured if they were implementing P2P, then I just needed to simmer down for a couple of hours until demand slowed and other users had downloaded bits of the shows, too. [They apparently sent invitations to everyone who signed up for beta testing, effectively flooding their servers.]
Sure enough, by Friday morning I was able to watch 3/4ths of a show without interruption. I left it running all day Friday too, and oh was it a bandwidth hog! I uploaded roughly 9 GB during the time I let my computer idle.
On Saturday morning I could watch any show available. The picture quality was fair – it beats iTunes and YouTube any day – but I’m disappointed it still looked fuzzy.
TV Habits
When I first heard of Joost I thought they would do something similar to TiVo: shows played at certain times of the day, depending on the day the programs changed, and you could hit a record button. In reality, Joost is true on-demand television: you pick a channel, and every show that channel has to offer is available- at all hours, every day. There is no worry of “I need to record that so I don’t miss it!” Your shows are always there.
Content
No SciFi available to the U.S. (the U.S. users continue to gripe), and the only major channels I immediately recognized were National Geographic, Comedy Central, MTV and VH1. Other channels were pretty self-explanatory, though, so it was easy to find the content I wanted to watch: cartoons (Saturday Morning TV, Ren and Stimpy, Channel Frederator) and cooking recipes (The Recipe Channel). Of the channels I skimmed, most of the content is limited. The smallest offerings are between 3 and 5 shows, with 3-5 episodes per show on some channels.
National Geographic continues to provide quality content and high standards, even at the beta level for Joost. The highest quality picture I found came from the Recipe channel. Some channels I didn’t bother watching because I haven’t like their content for some time now, like MTV.
There are a few channels that are using Joost as nothing more than a dumping ground, however. Comedy Central has only posted shows that were cancelled or had low ratings. Really, Comedy Central, what are you thinking? While your online presence is strong and most of your popular shows are available online, why did you make the mistake of not taking advantage of Joost? If I can find the majority of my favorite shows in one place, I will generally visit only that place. Dumping Stella and Freakshow on Joost was a bad move. Hoarding all the good content in order to drive traffic back to your site comes off as narcissitic and overly cautious about using new technology.
Overall
I like the idea of television online, and am willing to wait for Joost to acquire more programming. The interface is beautiful and intuitive. It already looks promising, but there is definitely room for improvement concerning the picture quality and software performance (I have an Alienware PC built for 3D animation and video editing, and running Joost actually taxed my system enough to make the cooling system kick on high a few times).
Update
Beta 0.9.1 just got upgraded to 0.9.2. Ooh, I hope there are some new features!
