Joost

Thursday, February 1. 2007

Niklas ZennstrÃ¶m and Janus Friis are the guys behind the file sharing and peer to peer sites Skype and Kazaa. Their most recent project involves television. I'll call it "television" but I'm not sure that's the right term for it. I'm not sure we have a term for it yet.

It started last year as the "Venice Project." It was a code-named, rather secretive project, but they did allow a limited number of people to be beta testers. Now it's called JOOST.

It's a peer-to-peer distribution technology that they described as combining "the best elements of the TV experience with the most powerful internet technologies, in a way that will redefine the way people think about television. It is not a file-sharing application or a video download service."

It lets you select from a number of TV channels (full screen & high quality video) but also puts interactive features (chat, news feeds, show links) on top of the channel you are watching.

Joost is in beta now, so stay tuned on this one.

Posted by Ken Ronkowitz in Tech at 14:06 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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I believe this is built (like another interesting startup you should check out called Songbird) on the Mozilla application framework.

Joost has 2 flaws by my look at it - getting content, they don't really have any and don't want amateur stuff (I'm OK with not having amateur stuff - but will this be the Nick at Night of international TV?) and it uses a separate software download rather than be browser-based, which is what gives YouTune its kick. Look at the problems you have mentioned about getting people to use iTunes - they prefer the podcast embedded in the page (yes, I know that's not the point of podcasting)

#1 Chaz on 2007-02-04 13:03 (Reply)

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