Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.
Or so we're told. After installing and starting the program, the first thing you'll notice about Joost is it's user interface. It's simple, but it's slick. It's quite easy on the eyes, with the translucent menus and large rounded buttons. In general, it's quite easy to get around, and most things can be achieved by clicking the left mouse button.
To start watching videos, you can access them through the channel catalogue. It's pretty well-organized and lets you pick the channels from sorted by popularity or recency or staff recommendations
You can also search for particular videos.
Once you've found a video, you can click on the triangular "Play" button on the right-hand side of the entry to start watching. At full-screen, the video quality is watchable, it's somewhat better than Youtub, but not by a lot. You can reduce the size of the screen by clicking on it, and you'll notice the images are a lot sharper.
You can bring up the control panel by moving the mouse about when the video is playing, which allows you to pause, fast-forward or rewind, among other things.
A neat feature for bloggers is that there is an integrated function for blogging from within Joost. Not sure if it provides any value for me, but it seems useful for the multi-taskers who can watch the streams and blog at the same time.
Joost also lets you critique the shows by allowing you to rate it. The lowest one star means terrible and the max of five means awesome. It's a bit crude as there is nowhere to place your comments on why you think it sucks or shines. Anyway, here's what I think of "2005 Making of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit".
If you decide Joost is something you can recommend to your friends, you can send them an invite.
Is Joost worthy of the attention it's getting?
The user interface is well-done, but ultimately content is still king. There's some interesting content out there, including documentaries and sports and music videos, but I don't think there is enough. And I've been getting the following messages when I try to open a few videos, which is pretty annoying. Other times, clicking on the "Play" button simply has no effect.
No comments:
Post a Comment