Hear, hear! The latest word on Joost.

It's always nice, and a bit annoying, when someone else articulates your own feelings in words in a much better way than you yourself have been able to do. So, it's with a mixture of both that I just read William Coopers article on the new developments over at Joost on his Informitv-pages - read it here - and find that the feeling in the back of my head I've had every time I've opened Joost (or Babelgum for that matter), and the probable reason why I check it out once a week - tops - nowadays, was just exactly what William stated at the end of the article.

As he points out, Joost and its rivals represent a breakthrough when it comes to technical matters, programming, how to use the Net and so on. What they don't represent is a better way of consuming media - at least not a more appealing way. As William says -

"At the moment, [Joost and Babelgum] seem rather sterile. Unlike television, which is constantly appealing to its sense of immediacy through a continuous flow of programming and promotion, these video-on-demand environments are less dynamic. As with many other on-demand systems, there is a sense that the same material will still be there tomorrow, in which case why watch it now?"

Quite so.

Babelgum, Joost, Vuze, Microsoft Surface...there are so many of them!

Just started testing Babelgum as well (you all know, that Joost-competitor). Must say that at the moment my bucks are on Joost in that particular battle, as I find the usability of Babelgum a bit less intuitive and straight-forward. Might just be me, but I'm finding it hard to easily get to what I want to look at - or even find anything that I might want to look at. Joost gives a quicker and clearer overview of content on the service, which in my book gives them the clear advantage.

Hadn't noticed, but Azureus, the Bittorrent client that is the most downloaded client of them all, has also gone legit in the past months. Their service - Vuze - has made deals with a lot of content providers, such as Showtime Networks, BBC Worldwide, Bennett Media Worldwide, G4, A&E Networks (including A&E, History, and Biography channels), National Geographic, and Starz Media (this I copypasted from their website, sorry :) - and are offering up SD and HD content to all subscribers. Another competitor to Joost and Babelgum, hooray!

Also,if you want to watch movies, anime, cartoons or tv-series, you can visit Joox. It is a portal to the Stage6 service on the divx.com platform, and my god do they have lots of content. Good quality as well, even on old stuff like Fawlty Towers. LMAO indeed.

Finally, looks like Microsoft have gone all aestethic all of a sudden. Check out the new Microsoft Surface, available later this year, which is a desktop integrated into a 30" table screen. It's interface looks really really neat, and there seems to be lots of nifty details and features in it. Have to get me one soon :)


Microsoft Surface, looking good. But will it bug? ... OF COURSE IT WILL!

Babelgum, the new Joost (even though there IS no Joost on the market yet :)

Hi ho Silver!

Funny thing, that. As soon as someone comes up with something, someone else does as well. Just have a look at Babelgum, a service now in Betatesting (just like Joost), that is set to "blend the lean-back experience of traditional TV with the interactive and social power of the Internet" (just like Joost), offering 2cutting-edge peer-to-peer technology to stream video to your PC safely and efficiently at near-TV resolution" (just like Joost) and lost of other stuff (just like Joost).

As I'm not (yet) betatesting Babelgum, I can't comment on the service itself, but William Cooper over at informitv is testing both, and has a pretty good review here. By the looks of it, what the consumer would REALLY like is a blend of the two. Which is about as likely to happen as a sudden and everlasting peace in the Middle East, or some such thing.

Well, as a future consumer of TV over broadband, I'll just say that the more people are working on getting these things to work better and better, with niftier and niftier widgets and GUI:s, the better. Keep'em coming!