May 8, 2007

Joost Needs Some More Juice

The much hyped upcoming video service Joost is now in beta mode. I gave this video service a spin this morning to see what the full-screen video quality was like.

Here's a screen shot I took of MTV's "Laguna Beach" - click for larger image:

While the streaming video delivered over this P2P network loaded quickly, the video quality was not as good as I anticipated. Some of the videos I watched in full-screen mode during my 15 minutes of experimentation were pretty choppy - I've seen better quality Flash and QuickTime videos, although in smaller windows. And I don't think that the Joost videos are as good as the streaming DivX-encoded videos I've seen - take a look at this post from April where I embedded a DivX video of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie". Right-click on this video and you can watch in full-screen mode.

So I'm disappointed with Joost because after all the promotional buzz, I thought they would be offering a new delivery mechanism that would offer high-quality video to huge audiences.

That said, I think community-enhanced video services like Joost hold promise for reshaping how video is consumed by the general public. In the screen shot below (click on image for full-screen view), you can see the interactive features that Joost offers. You can chat with friends and send instant messages while watching a video. You can also read screen text about the videos and rate them as well. More of these interactive tools will be added over the coming months.

I'm very interested in seeing what will happen when you integrate real-time community tools with high-quality, streaming dance videos. But it looks like we'll have to wait a bit longer until that happens.

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