Joost, which comes from the creators of Kazaa and Skype, is a soon to be publically available IPTV solution to media distribution. Joost uses a peer to peer platform that allows it to propogate mainstream and popular content amongst many users with the minimialist amount of bandwidth on their servers. Joost is a pet project that sprung up from the popularity of P2P clients like Bitorrent and the Kazaa framework. The need for a versatile yet robust and legitimate system of distribution was something that was already being worked on by both Princeton and Cambridge University, in fact there are rumours of a competitor application coming out soon from Cambridge and a joint venture with an undisclosed university in India.
Piracy has only increased in the last few years, coupled by the popularity and accessibility of video streaming sites like YouTube and Dailymotion which have alreadycome under threat of lawsuits from content owners like Viacom. Joost differs from this legal quagmire by already signing up several large content publishers to share their shows and programs through Joost through an ad-supported model. CBS and Viacom (rumored) to have already signed up, and other smaller scale content owners like National Geographic, BBC, OLN, and Chum (Canadian media conglomerate) have already begun offering their shows and programs through the network.
View My TV recently got a chance to play around with an ultra-private beta version of Joost (not the regular beta, but one intended for developers and lead bug submitters). While there are no major differences between the two betas the second beta clearly has a few more programmes available to it (mostly varied National Geographic documentaries like 'Really Wild Animals - Dinosaurs'
. As a View My TV Exclusive we'll show you around some of what Joost currently does and the pitfalls users currently experience. One of the main things you show know about Joost is that it's not intended to be a substitute of cable or sattelite television, which is one of the biggest misconceptions about Joost. It has been advertised by many popular and notable sites as being a way to watch television on your computer. As View My TV found out, this is not true and couldn't be further from the truth.
Joost is in reality, a platform to efficiently stream static videos on demand to the user, utilizing a peer to peer framework that allows the minimalist amount of bandwidth to be used on Joost's server to distribute and propogate a video to millions (if not more) users. Joost attempts to do this through its own proprietary p2p protocol that sends parts of the video the various users and then allows them to swap their segments in a manner that allows them to watch the video as it streams. It's essentially like youtube and bittorrrent mixed together, only that its syncronous and users can watch as the video is loading or being streamed. The main difference is also that every user ends up sending portions or data to other users, and so in turn each user helps out and contributes their bandwidth (un)willingly to help other users recieve the video. By doing this Joost is able to present video that has television-esque clarity (soon to be hd quality), while not requiring a lot of bandwidth on Joost's servers part. This is a godsend for distributors as they can now utilize the users bandwidth to stream content.
The bad news, as View My TV has found out, is that this can eat up a lot of bandwidth since your downloading and uploading - twice as much bandwidth is used on the users part. Each user is only given a set amount of data that they can transfer to whatever sites they visit each month, and for the average View My TV reader, that amount varies anywhere between 5gb (very low) to 80gb (very very high and rare). Originally, most would never reach anything near 5gb, but with video sites like YouTube and downloading through p2p and other programs this is becoming a reality. But now that limit is closer to something like 11gb and above, and with Joost - you'll need a lot if you intend to use it frequently. Joost officials reported to View My TV that for just 30 minutes, about the time of a regular tv show, you'll use 500mb at minimum. That's 1/2 of a gig! If you were to download the show or program from ITunes or through a torrent site, it would most likely be 1/2 of this file size or perhaps 300mb at maximum due to the compression algorithms that are available. But Joost uses heavy compression, but still manages to use more bandwidth - why? The answer lies in the fact that Joost not only downloads, but uploads - so you're sharing that file not just with one other user but several users. You end up sharing the video with potentially 3+ users at a time and that means your giving away 3+ times the amount of bandwidth used to download it. If you're on the lower spectrum of the bandwidth list, you're giving away a large portion of your Internet livelihood so that someone else can watch (not to mention to help CBS/NBC and Joost profit through ads - but we'll talk about that later). Watching 5 hours of Joost programming could run you something like 4 gigabytes of streaming bandwidth - quite hefty, especially if you're on a 5 or 10 gb a month limit. There is no solution for this, and unfortunately this is a major problem already being experienced in the beta community for Joost. The beta program we tested fortunately had a bandwidth monitor and showed current and recent usage with throttle control to limit how much is used in one or more sessions.
Finally, we come to their business model - which is of course ad supported. Joost is planning on offering a large cut to each broadcaster provided they offer their shows and content as vestals of their dedication to the project. While very little is known about how Joost plans to make money through advertising, View My TV was able to score an exlcusive piece of information about one manner in which they plan to do business with e-retailers thanks in part to Joost team leaders who willingly disclosed a brief bit of information on this to us. Joost basically intends to offer targetted marketting through context and content sensitive advertising. So in the example on the right, an ad for the Lassie DVD appears when watching the Lassie programs and shows. Even more interesting is that Joost plans to selectively tag parts of a video according to actual items shown or used within the program and will have an ad overlay so that if the user mouses over the item in the program, it will show an ad or where they can buy it. So for example, on the show Friends you would be able to see clothing and items for sale or consumption and where they can be bought. The best example that I could predict would be the Seinfeld episode for Junior mints, whereby watching the episode and mousing over the box of Junior mints would cause an ad to popup to show you where you can buy them (as if you needed an ad to begin with). But this is quite creative and probably would pay dividends for them.
So overall View My TV hopes we've shown you the ins and outs of Joost, and although we didn't go over exact details of how the program feels, we can tell you that at this stage its quite bloated and has a high memory usage footprint - but would you really care? Free and legal tv streaming is probably enough to get even the most stringent and conservative lipped users a reason to use Joost. As such everyone at View My TV sees many reasons why you may want to avoid Joost initially until they can get the bandwidth problems out of the way.