Wednesday October 03, 2007

Free TV on Joost

joost.com, wikipedia.org :

Yesterday I was on leave and one of my RSS feeds picked up on an announcement by Joost that accounts are being opened to the public just a few hours back. I had some time before going out for lunch, so I downloaded the client, and was soon watching free, legal, streaming Internet TV. Quick sum-up for the impatient :

- Free, *legal*, high-quality content
- Content providers include Reuters, National Geographic, Atlantic Sci-fi channel, Fifth Gear, etc.
- From founders of Skype and Kazaa
- Uses H.264 codec (HDTV-based), P2P streaming client

The quality is pretty darn good for net-based streaming. I was half-expecting Youtube but instead I got something close to DVD-rip. It played very well, widescreen, on my Samsung 37" LA37R81BX LCD TV via the dual-DVI output on my Leadtek 8600GT (which incidentally, has gone down in price - a lot - at S$179, compared to S$290 for my older AGP A7600GT just a year or so ago).

Content-wise, they aren't as good yet as the regular cable TV channels, but you can expect that to change over time as they sign up more content provider partners. They already have National Geographic. If they add Discovery Channel that's all I'd need. Sports channels might be a bit harder, since let's face it, that's like the bread and butter of the cable TV stations.

Tech-wise, I'm impressed. I mean, H.264 codec. Wow. HDTV territory. This is on par with or better than XVID with the advanced options turned on, including GMC and QPEL (global motion compensation, quarter-pixel).

UI-wise, it's very nice. I'm not that much into UI design but it looks quite slick, in an Apple-inspired kind of style. It runs on XUL, the same platform that Mozilla Firefox uses. You could think of Joost as a Firefox for browsing TV, just like Firefox is for browsing the web.

Security-wise, it initially seems a bit overboard. I mean, military-grade AES encryption for TV shows? But I wouldn't expect any less from the people came up with Skype, which is a P2P client that uses AES too. I'd suppose that helps with two things. One, it avoids traffic shaping by ISP's or bulk bandwidth carriers. See, if they throttle ALL encrypted traffic they would lose teleworking customers who depend on VPN's to get real work done. Two, it kind of helps to assure the content providers that their shows will not get intercepted along the way. Smart move.

I cancelled my cable TV subscription years ago. Maybe 4 years, maybe more. Gave up on the channel schedules. Gave up on the cost of all those channels. Joost is free. There are ads, but they are not intrusive. It's real video on demand. Watch anything whenever you like. This could be big. You could almost see the billion-dollar exit strategy coming for the Joost founders.

(2007-10-03 13:11:02 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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