Bits Turn up the Joost

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/05/01/turn_up_the_joost/1.html

 

I'm looking for an invite, so if anyone around's got one... thanks.

Very looking forward to it, but I didn't know we would have to pay for it when the beta is over, although I guessed it.
Tim, what's your internet connection ? What is the minimum to be confortable ?
EDIT : saw the lag issues...

 

We had James Murdoch in the office recently, and when talking about Sky's future he outright dismissed net TV for Sky (in the near future), simply because the current level of tech can't support the quality that Satellite/Cable/Terrestrial can deliver.

We are not there yet, but be in no doubt this is the future, truly on demand content.

 

Good review, I was concerned about what the quality would be like on standard use broadband.

What internet connection did you have by the way? 512K, 8MB, 24MB? Was it Cable or ADSL.

 

Nice review.

I would love to use it and hope 4MB connection is sufficient.

Does anyone have an invite they are willing to give me?

 

Interesting, this is defenently the future

 

loving joost at the moment, spesh for the kids tv

however because i'm a UK user i don't get national geographic or comedy central, i have to go and turn on ntl/vm for that

 

It would be nice to see these available to us UK users, can't see it happening though. But for a free service, it's actually really good.

 

I have beta and even on a 2meg connection it was suprisingly smooth and no pauses etc. VERY impressed and if the content is right I'll be happy to pay for it

 

Nice, and if anyone has an invite i'd love one

 

I've also not noticed any dramatic quality issues apart from different channels seem to be encoded differently.
National Geographic and I believe MTV aren't available to us in the UK however and I found the quality of the available programs to be poor or shows that I've seen before, obviously though it's still in beta but I find myself only watching it maybe every couple of days due to the lack of anything I enjoy actually being on there, which equates to about my normal TV viewing anyway.

 

invites are so rare nowadays !! Wish someone in the BT community could spare me one.
(i'm only saying this because I want one)

 

I've also got the beta... performance, even at college, is rather poor (although our connection is awful, and I'm pretty sure that the traffic gets throttled to boot), and I'm rather disappointed by both the video quality and the actual amount of content available. As net connections get faster and more companies sign on, that should theoretically go away, so not all hope is lost.

It's an amazing concept to say the least. But without some real improvement, you'd be nuts to pay for it.

Anyways, I've got a few invites left (I got three, sent them out pretty quick, and got five more, just gave a couple of those away too) - lemme know if you want one

 

A side note - at the time of writing, I was unaware that Joost has made a recent announcement that it will remain free to use as a service, instead being promoted by advertising revenue. I wish I could find the sources for my original assertion that it will be subscription based, but I will change the article to reflect this information. In effect, this is a little more worrying to me - there don't seem to be enough ads to support the content that Joost is offering.

My internet connection at the time is a 1MB Cable, Doug

 

I'm not sure what the cable specs are in the US, is it 440~k up or 250~ or higher?

 

I have been in joost beta for ages, its an allright service, i wish they had mythbusters and the simpsons, those shows would be watched all the time, i have a 5mb line at work and never have these issues with quality

 

when can i get this? how much is it? is it going to be free? or only if you're invoted by a friend? i dont get it lol but i would like it

 

Fifth Gear sucks. >_>

 

good: 2mb pipe cable is good enough for quality shows here in canada, no lag other than waiting for it to start....quality is great, altho not excellent. easy to use, etc.
bad: no NationalGeographic channel here in BETA in Canada.... other channels are pretty much crappy....

summary: not enough content for Canadian viewer. without content, quality and technology is useless.... id just turn on my TV and thats the end of it... sorry...

 

Just thought I'd give my €0.02 concerning the video quality

From what I've seen it seems like the few times you actually get a really clean couple of frames is right after a keyframe, but only until the content changes more or less dramatically.

What that tells me is they've encoded this video with too few keyframes and at an awful bitrate using a lousy encoder...

Hopefully they'll deliver some greater encodings with more accurate keyframing once the service goes out of beta.

Otherwise I don't see myself using it.

BTW I'm on a 20mbit line and I get lag and really low res as well. I hope that's why it's beta.