Joost

Memory hog. Unnecessary full screen interface. Super cool.

The creators of Skype and the college staple Kazaa, have released a legal, industry backed, video on demand application. At one time it was known as "the Venice Project", it has been renamed Joost, and is currently undergoing beta-testing. To sign up for the beta-test and download the software, follow this link ---> Link! The interface is relatively smooth, I was able to stream a good quality Gym Class Heroes music video and an episode from Laguna Beach. This is the strength of Joost, somehow they convinced companies like Viacom to allow them to distribute their content on a sponsorship based system. When I loaded up the video, up popped a quick brand logo for Motorola, it appeared, disappeared, and the video started. Considering Joost is in beta, it is a strong sign that video loading and playback was smooth; Joost operates on a form of p2p using h.264 as the video decoder. The more users, the more nodes that can be downloaded from, and thus the smoother playback will be. It's not even under wide internet adoption and it's already smooth. Good sign.

There have been other video services that have been similar, but this is the best one I've seen so far. Democracy 2.0 was cool, but the content was limited; think of it as populated by free video podcasts or a YouTube that was trying to deliver tv length shows (Democracy 2.0 streamed the Wine Library TV, that was cool).

YouTube is going to have some serious competition. The only drawback so far is that the software isn't anywhere near as optimized as it needs to be. It was eating up ~ 130 MB of RAM and slowing down my computer. Mind you my machine is an Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB of Ram, and a 512 MB Radeon 9800 Pro, which while not bleeding edge, is still a pretty fast rig.

Still... sweet deal.