Joost coolness

I’m not sure how to describe Joost aside from on-demand, internet tv clips from the crew that put together Skype and Kazaa. A while back I managed to land an invite from Joost for their private beta test, and have enjoyed running it on my Macbook Pro (they support Windows and Intel Macs at this point). Very little lag when you first fire up a program, and haven’t had any issues once a show starts. They seem to be landing more and more content every time I check in with it. They’ve got all sorts of channels:

• news - CNN and Routers
• sports - soccer, indy cars, hockey…
• music - more than I care to shake a stick at
• movies - an assortment of indie stuff, some less than popular stuff from Paramount, “The Really Terrible Film Channel”, and a channel full of Godzilla movies :)
• tv - a variety of stuff past and present - sci-fi stuff like Babylon 5, crap like Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, stuff off Spike/Comedy Central/MTV/VH1/National Geographic
• misc. animation - adult swim, old school transformers/gi joe, rocky & bullwinkle, anime, and assorted stuff from production companies like aardman animations (makers of Wallace & Grommet)

Anyway, it’s turning into a pretty cool source for free tv goodies as long as you’ve got a decent net connection. Some stuff relies on advertising, but it hasn’t been as obnoxious as what you’d find on regular tv so far (e.g. 10 minutes for ads in a 30 minute show on real tv).

Since it’s still in beta, you need an invite to get in. They’ve apparently scaled to the point where they can handle faster growth of their user base as they’ve given everyone “unlimited” invites at this point. So if anyone wants and invite, let me know.