I got an invitation to join the Joost beta the other day. For those of you not familiar, Joost is a basically a form of online television. Instead of having normal channels like CBS, ABC, and NBC. The channels are specific to the content on them. For example, there is a Green Day channel, an Indy Car channel, and a Gaming channel. Currently there are about 25 channels to choose from. The interface is simple and clean and easy to navigate. In addition to the standard channel flipping methods you can also search for shows by name or type. Joost allows for full screen viewing or putting it in a window so I can easily watch have shows going while I do other stuff on my computer. The full screen is nice for putting it on my TV.

I did notice a little stuttering at first on a couple shows, but generally the video looks really great, even at full screen. I need to try it out somewhere with a slower connection speed to see how it does with the buffering and streaming, but so far it has always performed well. The Joost website lists that the application downloads approximately 320Mb of data an hour and uploads about 105MB an hour. So, a broadband connection is definitely required. Joost is peer-to-peer based so instead of pulling all of the video from a central server it speeds up the process by allowing videos to be pulled form other Joost locations that are closer to you.

One thing that would be nice to see added is a way to sort shows by genre. For example, lets say I want to see all of the different sporting shows across all of the channels; currently I would either need to scroll through channels by name or search for sports. The searching does work well, but to be able to see different genres by themselves would be nice.

Joost is currently in talks with quite a few different networks so I expect the amount of content to grow quite quickly as if becomes more popular. The social aspects of Joost are what really set it apart from other online video sources. The ability to chat with people watching the same show I am is great. I anticipate that once out of beta Joost will be very popular and will attract a lot of attention.

Joost is free to use and watch because it is ad based, but so far I’ve only seen a couple of ads. Far less than if I were watching normal television. I know some people will be turned off by this, but I’d rather have Joost be free with ads than have to pay for it.

[Update] Wow. There are a lot of people interested in getting a Joost Invite. I still have plenty more to send so keep the requests coming. Due to the number of invite requests I’ve been getting I’ve made a change to comment moderation. I will be approving comments as I send the invites for them. Now, when you see your comment is posted I will have also sent you the invite for Joost as well. Hope that makes it a little easier for everyone. I’ll continue to try and send out Joost Invites as soon as I receive the requests.