Today, I received an invitation to Joost, a company who provides self-proclaimed “how-it-should-be TV”. I have to say that I am probably not among the target group since I’m not watching any regular TV either. Either way, I installed the Joost software (which by the way is built with XUL and run with XULRunner) and gave it a try. The setup is pretty straightforward: Just start the software, click on “Register”, enter a username, e-mail address and password and you’re registered and logged in right away. No e-mail confirmation is needed.

Once logged in, you see an introductary sequence showing snippets from the “best” Joost content. There are currently 83 channels of which some are restricted to or not available in certain countries, however, most of the channels are available worldwide. I think that the selection of channels is not really “how-it-should-be”; they don’t provide much interesting channels. There are quite some music channels and lots of niche or not-so-niche sports channels. The majority of them has a typical MTV program: They mainly show stuff you want to watch if you have too much time left.

Joost is not really TV how you’re used to it. It is merely on-demand TV: It looks like each channel has 5-20 TV shows or movies in the “playlist” (which probably change from time to time). There is no “live” stream. You could probably compare Joost with TiVo, just that you don’t have to record the shows in advance.

Besides the poor quality of available programs, the service itself is rather fast. It takes about 2-5 seconds to switch from one to another channel. Remember that the entire content is streamed over the internet. The software application itself is not that bad, although the navigation could be a lot more streamlined. Buttons are at lots of different places (they frequently change position from one “dialog” to the next) and the navigational structure is in my opinion not well thought out.

I noticed that Joost also offers a kind of “dashboard” where you can drag “widgets” onto (I’m asking myself where they got that idea from *cough*). These include socializing features (“channel chat room”, instant messaging, …). I somehow doubt that these are really necessary, but of course they are a requirement for being considered a web 2.0 service.