re:ad

In one of the latest editions of WIRED I came across an article featuring Joost, the brand-new project from Kazaa and Skype creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. With the IPTV Software Joost they will now try to revolutionize the way we are watching TV.

Services like YouTube have changed the way we are watching and sharing videos in the internet. With Internet Protocol TV, web and television will work seamlessly together in one channel, offering advantages from both worlds. A big problem in delivering music, videos and other large files over the net is the bandwidth. Joost therefore makes use of peer-to-peer streaming technology, at the moment mainly used for downloading purposes in BitTorrent and the like. This approach is now taken to deliver streaming video directly to the user’s screen. This enables users to receive high quality pictures via the internet, as the P2P network caches content on the users hard disks in tiny fragments and thereby enables data to follow various paths when being streamed from other users. See more details on the Joost technology in the WIRED article.

Joost does not offer much content at the moment, but due to the the really deep pockets of the two founders and their current initiatives to close content deals with major media companies, this situation will definitly change in the near future.

To navigate through the content Joost is offering a virtual remote control with classic control buttons and an additional search box to start a keyword search. Futher there is the possibility to open a program guide with personalized »smart channels«.

The really intersting thing with IPTV is, that it can utilize all those handy tools we are getting more and more used to in the web, and that’s what Joost actually does. It offers widgets with all the features we know from social networks: a buddy list, instant messaging, an option to “Rate it!”, a “Share What I’m Watching!” button…

When considering the possibilities involved in terms like Web2.0, IPTV can definitly change the way we will watch TV in the near future. Just think about creating a structure based on tagging and folksonomy with all the video content available, or make it possible to recommend content to other users or moreover let the system suggest interesting movies to you based on your preferences.

It seems like there are many opportunities in this field and I am sure that the concept of IPTV will gain more and more attention in the next years. To sum up the potential of Joost and the technology behind it, a quote from the WIRED article:

Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!

After I finished reading the article some days ago I registered for the Joost beta, but I am still in the queue waiting to receive my invitation, but I am almost sure there are way too many people waiting out there… but as I recognized today, I could maybe have been one of the last beta applicants, as Joost has relaunched their website and is a closed beta from now on. This means no more applications for Joost beta, just via invitation. So, if you are one of the lucky ones who has a beta account with an invitation left… yep - let me know!

Remark
Recently I came across an other IPTV software offering a slightly different service by delivering the the current television program instead of a video on demand service. The service offers a much broader variety of TV channels including BBC World, CNN and even some Austrian channels. Moreover it is interesting that the service of Zattoo is only available in Switzerland although the company is based in the US.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.