Joosty Wiiness

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 12th April, 2007 @ 23:04

After waiting a few months I've finally been accepted into the Joost beta program and have got it setup on my iMac. So far I'm pretty impressed. It certainly shows off just what you can build with XUL, the foundation XML user interface technology from the Mozilla project.

Said interface is really rather slick, which nice transparencies over the playing video and smooth transitional effects. You can certainly get the impression they're aiming to provide an experience much closer to conventional television than your usual TV over the Internet sites. My only gripe is that it's not quite as responsive to my clicks as I'd like, but hopefully that'll improve as the formal release approaches.

On to the content. First off, it's was usefully fast at kicking off playing the many videos they've made available, I'm on 10Mbit broadband but looking at the download speeds, in practice 1-2Mb would probably be just fine. Which leads naturally to the quality... it's moderate for something that's playing 'mostly' fullscreen. In keeping with their TV not PC model, you'll probably want to be sitting a few feet back if you don't want to see too much of the blocky JPEGidness of it. Fast movements didn't survive too well. Hopefully an increased bitrate will also appear later on.

The range of content isn't too bad considering the early stages of the project. A variety of indie short films, some sports and documentaries, a manga channel, Fifth Gear gets it's own channel and a fair range of music related stuff. It's a good initial showing though more will definitely be required to make it something I'd want to use every day.

The business model seems to be just like normal network television, ad supported. At the moment these ads are pretty unobtrusive. Saying that, most of the content is shorts, how it will affect longer programming remains to be seen.

Overall, a good start, the software is refined and pleasurable to use for the most part, and the content is a promising initial showing. Watch this space. Or rather their space.

On another subject, I've got a Wii! But I'll leave that for another time, after I've tried it on my mum :-)