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Today I was given my Beta access to Joost, following the first Joost Commercial (see the commercial below) that appeared a little more than a week ago. Joost is your online TV application, which comes with a wide range of channels, where each channel has its even wider range of series, music videos or films. The application is the TV set/browser, meaning that they do have more control over their content than certain other solutions.

Their interface is simple and quite pretty, as well as the wide variety of channels will hopefully suite many of your tastes. Channels can be chosen Alphabetically or by Genre.

Once you have chosen a channel you are automatically taken to the next show, song or episode or you can navigate directly to a desired program within the channel. Each program’s name as well as length is included and a short description can be chosen by clicking on the “i”.

Once inside a program usually while loading you may be shown a simple splash commercial for one of Joost’s investors. Below is a screenshot while watching a music video from Prodigy for their song Out of Space.

Living in Norway I do experience some hick-ups, when the showing video freezes or struggles to refresh certain pixels. When it does run smoothly, watching on a computer monitor with rather high-resolution can make some of the Joost video look rather sloppy. So as far as quality and speed goes, there is definitely room for improvement. I think it will also be great when they add more content. Unfortunately I was not able to run it off my old PPC iBook as it requires an Intel processor to work on your Mac. Though it is also available for Windows, while Linux is on its way(?).

Another great thing about Joost is that they offer commercial content, material that is normally copyrighted for your viewing pleasure. Some of channels that are available are: DR, Fight Network, Fifth Gear Shortcuts, IndieFlix Premier Hits, Joost Suggests, Lazy TV, Ministry of Sound, MTV, PokerHeaven TV, The Trance Channel and much more. (Although certain other channels may be region specific.)

So overall I am really excited about Joost, and I think you will like it as well. (Joost is still in Beta, and only available by invite at the moment.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under video, tv, applications, online, web-20. 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.