Joost – Free Legal TV

The other day I went to a meeting of INEX – the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange – of which we are members.
Apart from the standard updates etc., there were also a number of talks including one by Colm who now works for Joost.
His talk was fascinating, as he explained not only what Joost is, but also how it actually works and what kind of network infrastructure they need to run it.
I like the idea of being able to watch music videos, tv, film and more on my desktop PC legally, which is exactly what Joost allows you to do.
Unfortunately the only way you can get into Joost at present is via invite, but luckily someone was kind enough to send me one, so I got in and downloaded the software yesterday.
Once downloaded it was simply a matter of setting up a basic profile and then I could watch TV.
The Joost system works on a peer to peer basis, so the more popular shows are a lot faster to stream than the less popular ones. I didn’t spend too much time watching it last night, but I did get to see enough to be impressed.
The picture quality is pretty good. While it’s nowhere near DVD quality it’s perfectly acceptable. Sound quality is fine, though anyone with a finely tuned ear would probably find the compression a little annoying.
Downsides?
At present the client software is only available on Windows and Mac.

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By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and CEO of Irish hosting provider and domain name registrar Blacknight.

20 comments

  1. Hi,
    What kind of selection do they have currently? Sounds pretty cool!
    Thanks 🙂
    -Tom

  3. Michelle-
    Any ideas on how to get a friends invite? I’m a poor college student, so none of my friends are into this yet. It sounds amazing, though, much like the google-tv theory sounded.
    It sounds awesome! Hope you have a good time with it!
    -Joanna

  4. Oh lucky you! I was trying to figure out how to watch tv from my computer about 6 months ago, so I am really happy that Joost came out! Hopefully someone I know will send me an invite eventually.
    Thanks for the update. I look forward to seeing it work.
    Cheers

  5. Ah, I just saw where we can get invited through the link in this post. Thanks for letting us know!

  6. Thanks for the response Michele. Only downside is that the one channel I would be most interested in (scifi) is offlimits for the US (so far..)
    -Tom

  7. Hi Michelle,
    It sounds like you’ve had a great experience. It sounds like the way TV is going, people watch shows not so much networks. I’d be honored if you’d send me an invite.
    Cheers!
    Rob

  9. I’m currently sending Cormac an invoice for crashing my PC with this Joost thing.
    Although I think I’ll ask him for another invite to see if I can get it working. 🙂

  10. Have to say I’ve been experimenting with Joost on an 8MB connection for the last month, and it often performs pretty poorly — especially in the late afternoon and early evening. No denying the picture quality is pretty decent on a PC. However it does raise the question of how the bandwidth will be soaked up if it becomes hugely popular. Skype, by contrast, uses very little bandwidth, even for voice services. However Joost is into, I believe, something like 300 – 400MB per hour downstream for a show. Now that’s impressively lean for this sort of thing but it’s still a lot. As it gets more popular I wonder if the infrastructure will be able to support the demand?
    Ralph
    ENN

  11. Ralph
    From my understanding of how it works, it’s all peer to peer with them supplying extra nodes to send you more content.
    As it’s video it’s going to use a LOT more bandwidth than Skype !
    Presumably the more users the better it will scale.
    Michele

  13. it only works on x86 macs , which sucks for people who haven’t upgraded their ppc mac and don’t use windows 🙁
    roll on a linux version!

  18. Helloo :).
    This TV seems to be great.I’d like to try it.
    Is here some wonderful Humanoid who can share this experience with me? 🙂
    Please please , the invitement.
    3-m41L: mathio(at)azet.sk
    Thank you very much in advance.

  20. Would you please send me an invitation.
    Here is my E-mail Address:
    kuulko@gmail.com
    Please. Thank you….
    Hmm this is cool.. free internet tv… 🙂 Im student this is chance change future..

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