Joost: Online TV at its Best

I downloaded it, I installed it, and I watched it all within 5 minutes, and I had to pry myself away to do this review. Joost is a streaming P2P platform for television. It brings you TV or near-TV quality content in an application that uses P2P. The app is a cross-platform application. It’s ad-funded, and from what I understand you won’t be able to simply share content on Joost like you can on YouTube. It’s TV in the old fashioned sense of the word - they give you content, you watch it; only on internet. It makes up for this with the quality of the content and the features of the software.

The installation is simple and smooth. Joost is a little power hungry, taking up about %40 of my resources. I am using Joost on a 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM desktop so it isn’t so bad. Joost starts in full screen. It’s a television, so the general idea is that you fire it up and start watching, and in this Joost succeeds. The UI looks more like a media center interface than your standard Windows application. The icons are big and easy to hit, and while the scrolling may be a little slow at some points, it’s perfect for using on the TV screen. The UI consists of the main controls at the bottom, channel chooser on the left, and a link to My Joost, your customized Joost screen where you can load up plugins, on the right. It’s not the most beautiful UI design I’ve seen, and what’s more important, all of Joost is transparent and made with the idea of not getting in the way of your viewing experience, like Windows Media Center.

I definitely do not have the fastest internet connection in the world. Videos did stutter, but rarely. This was my biggest concern, and I can say that Joost passed this test, although not with a perfect grade. In conclusion, Joost is free. That’s not bad at all. The application works great, looks OK, and if you have a decent internet connection, you’ll have no problems using it. Everything else seems to be in place, so if the content is there, I’m sure people will love it.