Joost on the way from the social web to Internet TV

There is more and more talk of a new generation of Internet TV and, in this connection, about the Joost project ( www.joost.com ). Frankly, when I first saw the project with its desktop version, I was amazed at the effectiveness of this decision. The design of the application is very unobtrusive, free, but at the same time all the controls are well thought out, enriched with interactivity in the best traditions of the RIA. The video is played in full screen mode in quite acceptable quality (an obvious step forward compared to the quality of YouTube-videos). All the video shows presented in the project were created by professionals, and for the viewer who is not spoiled by the quality of Western TV, all this makes, at least, an indelible impression at first. Joost's statement about the presence of 1500 shows in 250 channels, promises endless pleasure. However, what is Joost really like?






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Go to http://www.joost.com/download/ and download the desktop application itself. During installation, the program will offer to register on the Joost server, which will allow us to further personalize our virtual space in the project. What will it give? Traditional set: list of favorite shows, the ability to vote for the show, a set of widgets. It should be noted that Joost shows ads in a very unobtrusive form, which hardly distracts you from viewing. The same applies to various surveys.

As for the minuses, in my opinion, there is an inconvenience in the very concept of the project - Joost does not show streaming video, but preloaded videos. Those. Joost is something medium between TV and Youtube.

In order to determine how well a project is implemented it makes sense to compare it with competitors (in this case with its clones). Habrahabr has already written about the clone DNAStream ( http://dnastream.tv ), but this is not the best option for comparison, for two reasons. DNAStream completely repeats the Joost user interface in flash implementation and this project does not use the desktop application. Let's take a look at Babelgum ( www.babelgum.com ). Babelgum is implemented according to the same principles as Joost, but in its own way. The viewing control panel is made in the style of a classic remote control. What is intuitively clear to the viewer, but greatly limits it in the new features of interactive TV. Babelgum feeds are categorized by tags, which is natural in the Web 2.0 era, but hardly convenient in this case. In addition, the archives of the show on Babelgum are distributed over two TV and Video channels. The interface is built, so it’s not very clear what the Video section is for. It is possible to create your own channels, based on your video content.





The Babelgum project will definitely find its audience, but there is an impression that Silvio Scaglia (the project founder), despite its millions, seems to have made few investments in Babelgum. Compared to Joost, the Babelgum implementation is definitely losing. However, the quality, volume and download speed of video content on Joost is also beyond competition.