mindgraffiti

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!

Related links:

• Joost from an HTPC Geek’s View
• Guest Post about Joost (pending)
• Short Critique/First Impressions on Joost
• Joost Beta Testing!