Angry in the Great White North

On March 17, I applied for an opportunity to enter the next beta test phase for Joost, and today I received an email with the instructions on how to install version 0.9.1 of the software. I have to say I'm impressed and intrigued.

If you haven't heard of Joost (rhymes with "juiced"), it is the future of television...maybe:

What's Joost?

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.

Inside the box

You get great internet features too, such as search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. And with no schedules to worry about, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you like - as often as you want. Joost is completely free, and works with most modern PCs and Intel Mac-based computers with a broadband connection. Get Joost today!

Well, you'll be getting hundreds in the future. In the beta phase, the selection of programs is limited, though still enough to keep me busy for days, if not more.

But back to the beginning. Installation on my IBM Thinkpad went flawlessly. When Joost runs, it runs by default in full screen mode, hiding everything including the Windows taskbar. The controls are hidden by default. When you move your mouse, the basic controls are displayed -- forward, backward, play, pause, volume, etc. Another control explands to select different channels. A third control expands to the widgets page.

Controls are displayed in a semi-transparent manner, overlaying the program being displayed on the full screen. A minimization icon in the upper right clears the screen of all controls until the mouse is moved again.

The underlying technology of Joost is the same as Skype. Not surprising, since the same people are behind both products. Skype and Joost both use peer-to-peer technology, the same as Kazaa. Instead of video being delivered by one server to all viewers, one layer of viewership is served by the server. Those viewers in turn serve other viewers with video, and so on, distributing the load of delivering the video across the network.

And it works. The programming was delivered nearly flawlessly. Sometimes a program would stutter, but rewinding to an earlier point usually allowed me to watch the entire program without problems.

So what is Joost really like?

This is where things get really interesting. Television is a "lean back" medium. You consume the data stream with virtually no control besides selecting the channel.

The internet, on the other hand, is a "lean forward" medium. The data is modified and filtered by your active participation in how the data is consumed.

But now you've got television on the internet in an implementation that is stable enough to really begin thinking about what will result from the convergence.

Being able to select from a library of programming is a jarring difference. Television is essentially rooted in temporal locality. That is, what you see is defined by what is playing at the moment you are watching, and nothing else. If your program isn't playing right now, there is little you can do other than wait. Joost, however, breaks that connection. Instead you have the latest episode of each show, as well as previous episodes, available for selection from the menu.

So how does that affect the viewing experience? It is an interesting question, but I think one of the strongest feelings I had was of watching the show by myself, in a way that never happens with television. Even if I'm the only one in my house watching television at that moment, I know that thousands of other people are experiencing the same program simultaneously. Even the pause-and-play function of my digital video recorder doesn't break that temporal connection all that much. That's a result of the lean back approach -- my personal circumstances, such as where I'm sitting in the room, have no impact of the delivery of the data, so I know everyone is receiving the data much the same way. But the lean forward approach means that I know that as I'm watching Cops Uncut, Episode 4, what I'm seeing is entirely a product of when I decided to start watching the program, whether I've paused, what other programs I'm running and switching between, what feeds I've got running in the Joost on-screen news ticker, and and such. No one else on Joost, even people watching the same program, are experiencing it the same way.

One of the widgets that can be turned on is the chatroom, one per show. It will display who else is watching, but I didn't see any significant conversations. To be fair, I've only sampled a small number of programs, but what can you say to someone who is 10 minutes ahead of you, or 10 minutes behind, or even 30 minutes out of sync, in a 45-minute program?

I wonder how popular a feature would be that would allow people to watch a program in the television mode -- a set start time and limited ability to pause or otherwise affect the presentation. You might see more interaction between viewers inside those specific channels.

Still, Joost as it stands is a remarkable technological achievement. The programming is varied. Most people would be able to find a fair number of programs they'd enjoy. More material is being added. Unfortunately, the beta phase is closed to new users. But while we wait for Joost to become fully available, give some thought to what we gain and what we lose by changing the television experience.