Is Joost going to be the future of TV?

Apr 17, 2007

Sometime back, I wrote about Streamick which showed various channels on the internet. To be honest, I really didn’t have much idea of their future plans, what they were planning for future and i.e. Peer to Peer TV. But, now I’m much clear about it. Although, Streamick has yet not released anything like Peer to peer TV but founders of Kazza & Skype have started another Peer 2 Peer project (gosh! they are PRO in this field and have made great success in the last two P2P projects, after all, who doesn’t know about Kazza & Skype). There new project is called Joost (pronounced as Juiced, I wonder that is it the naming, which is helping them in becoming huge hits).

Well, as you may have guessed that Joost is a Peer to Peer Television and without any Set top box or other device (except your computer and high speed internet connection), you’ll be able to watch the T.V. shows, movies and other videos from various media companies and that too for free. I mean, its free at this point of time but later on there may be charges for different kind of content.

Joost has partnered with Viacom and some other media players for the content distribution and the way they are partnering with many companies, it is for sure that they’ll be able to repeat the success, which they had in the past with Skype & Kazza. However, it is to be noted that the bandwidth was not a big issue in the last two projects, but in the case of Joost, it will be a big issue and it is always suggested that when you are watching the videos over the internet, the a internet connection with the speed of atleast 1 Mbps is a must and which is not available at reasonable rates across the world.

So, Joost which is certainly looking promising (I was recently invited by Joost for their Beta program) may find difficulty in attracting users from all across the world and which may not give them, the success as huge as Skype or Kazza. What do you think, that will Joost be the future of TV or will it be just another source of entertainment over the internet ?

Links : Joost | Reference

Technorati : Joost, P2P, ReviewSaurus, Streamick