Joost

I have been playing with the now famous Joost a bit. More out of curiosity than a desire to have more television in my life. It is interesting. If you want to become a beta tester send me a message. Here are my early impression of Joost.

1. It reminds me of the sort of TV you watch on long haul airline flights. A closed in sort of feeling but very slick. Limited content and knowing that there are only so many thousand others sharing in it. This limited but difficult to define audience results in a generalised sort of content that is very fragmented. I suppose this is a difficult thing. How is truly global TV going to look, not like cable or satellite which has defined points in the sender network. Joost,as I understand it, works along BitTorrent lines where content is sent via what computers are in the network at the time.

2. Really limited content at the moment. Several shows I saw on the program where United States only. The copyright and broadcasting rights for material will be a complicated affair I imagine. Plus which segment of the world's online population is Joost going to cater for? Will it manage in the arena of content when Youtube and hundreds of its clones are dominating at the moment? Getting Youtube content with Joost interface and scheduling would be nice but the structures of ownership and broadcasting (legal, geographic, advertising) would not allow it.

3. Joost should identify 5 or 10 areas that can be applied to programming on a global scale; arts, education, diaspora, travel, food, music, and family could be some. Each of these themes should be presented in as diverse a way as possible. At the moment content seems to be very western hemisphere and very commercial. Not that different from television as it is at the moment.

I don't think I will become a huge fan of Joost at the moment. There is clearly potential. Something like the Australian broadcaster SBS would be a good inspiration. As well community television would be another possible source of ideas. Because it would be different. Just being on the net is not enough. Joost has to bring us radical content and film clips of Linkin Park are not radical. Nor is a documentary about dogs, one about cats and another about horses.

Let's see where is goes as it is only early days. But I have a feeling the economics of Joost will mean they have to start getting a decent public quick and this will mean the lowest common denominator for programming. If they can afford to put in 3 to 5 years in development things may look different.