Joost Beta

This afternoon I was quite chuffed to discover that I’d been selected for a Joost beta invite. Joost is, in a nutshell, TV for the web . Kind of the opposite to that Current TV channel on Virgin Media. I’ve been playing with it this evening, mainly perusing the XL-Recordings and gaming channels.It all seems very good – a good seelction of channels (for me) straight off, with the ability to search Joost’s catalog of channels and add more to your collection. The interface (see shots below) is pretty swish and the advertising between shows (The maximum I endured was 2 * 10 second clips) does not detract from the channel content too much. Presumeably these are targeted advertisements, though it didn’t seem so from the few I watched. There is also the ability to interact in channels and a widget interface. I must point out that Joost is a legal service – I’m not in the business of pirating. It uses P2P (peer-to-peer), to distribute content to users – I had hardly any lags on my measly 2MB connection, although the full-screen content is compressed at quite a low bit rate.Apparently, the Mac version of joost works with the Apple remote, which I could see would make this a very pleasant experience. I think I’ll be playing with this toy a fair few more times this week.