If this is IPTV, I'm in

Today I got an invite for Zattoo, which claims to stream live TV to your PC using a desktop client application.



The installation went smooth, no problems at all. At start up Norton was complaining about the Zattoo application tying to connect to the net, which it obviously should. After mitigating that problem, everything was up and running - to my surprise it was running fast. Buffering takes less than a couple of seconds although I'm only running with 2 MBit/sec here. Sometimes switching channels doesn't even require buffering, it's like switching channels at your TV.

Sometimes the graphics are screwed like below, but overall it looks like above.



The application is still beta, but it's already very smooth. It doesn't need much memory or CPU, which in contrast to Joost is a big plus! From time to time, especially when I was doing some CPU intensive stuff, it would lag or even hang for a couple of seconds, but that shouldn't be a problem on a faster machine.

Bottom line: I love it! Give me more channels and I'm in! I don't need any interactive stuff like voting, chatting or message boards. It would be nice, but I rather have a clean and fast application than more features.

4 Joost invites

I have 4 Joost invites again. I'll give it to the first 4 people posting a comment here.

No Joost with proxy

Joost doesn't work if you are connected to the net through a proxy, which I think sucks big time. In addition to that you need to configure your firewall correctly to make it work.

I think this is a big no go for internet users, which can't tune their firewall or proxy settings. I also believe that Joost doesn't support proxies due to technical limitations, but due to content restriction based on user's location.

No more Joost invites

The last couple of days I received so many emails asking me for a Joost invite. Unfortunately I've got no more invites left so far. I'll post here on my blog as soon as I receive new invites.

Joost reloaded

A couple of months ago I blogged about Joost the first time, after reading about it on TechCrunch. Since then I've not checked it anymore, cause back then it was fairly alpha. Today I installed the latest beta, which is version 0.9.1.

Installation and setup are pretty straightforward. I didn't encounter any problems. The only thing I don't like is the instant start of Joost after the setup completed. I just want to be asked if I really want to do that right after installing it.

It works quite smooth even on my old 1.8 GHz / 1GB machine. When I switch beetween full screen and window mode there are some pauses, but hey it's still beta, right? Another problem is bandwidth. I only got 2MBits here and that's not enough for Joost, I guess. The videos stopped from time to time to buffer and the pauses were really annoying! With a standard 6 MBits connection there shouldn't be any problems.

So the cool thing about Joost is that there are somewhat social networking features. You can chat on channels with other viewer or you can create your own room to chat with your friends, while watching the same show. Another nice gimmick is the rss feed reader, which you can hook up with your feeds and read the headlines while watching a channel. I really like that.

I guess if there was better content and the quality was a little better it could be a real cool iptv application. And if there was an easy way to stream Joost to my lcd tv, I could imagine sitting in on my couch with a wireless keyboard chatting, while watching a show like Prison Break. I like this idea!

Joost

• Joost (aka The Venice Project) at TechnCrunch
• Joost
  

I first heard about Joost, formerly known as "The Venice Project" over at TechCrunch, so I decided to sign up for a beta account for this new "online tv" or "iptv service". Last week I got my account and I checked it out a little bit.

First I needed to sign up on the website and download a client software, which is about 10MB. The installation went smoothly, though it's not really transparent what's going on behind the scenes during the installation process of Joost (version 0.7.3).

After the first startup, it was quite clear that you should have an up-to-date machine to run Joost. I noticed that Joost uses about 90MB of memory, not matter if it's running or idling in the background. It also used about 50% of my CPU power when runing, which in my opinion is definitely too much for a tv software. Keep in mind that these figures are not a thorough analysis or benchmark, it's just what I observed using window's taskmanager on my machine.

The concept and usability of Joost is just awesome! You start the software, punch in your credentials and it'll start running right away. When you move the mouse an overlay menu comes up that let's you flip through a channel list or control the channel you are watching right now. Loading times of channels probably depend on your connection speed, but even with my 200KB/sec connection they are reasonable. I haven't gone through all the features, so there'll be definitely a follow-up post, once I've dug deeper into it.

The content so far is a little boring, there are various channels, even a channel called "Paris Hilton". There are no real movie or tv-show channels, at least I couldn't discover any. But since Joost is in beta, I think they'll add more content step by step. Overall I must say it's a pretty impressive piece of software, considering it's only a 0.7.3 version.

At first I wasn't really excited about the whole iptv concept. In fact I'm still skeptical on how this whole concept is gonna evolve. But with projects like Joost, I think it has a lot of potential to work out quite nicely.