Franchu’s lair

Thanks to an invitation that I got from a friend, I managed to enter the beta test program for Joost that is one of the most exciting projects I have heard of lately. It was previously known as The Venice Project and is developing a system to provide realtime high quality video streaming based on P2P networks.

As broadband is becoming the norm in quite a big part of the world, I am sure that we will start to see more examples of these services in the near future. But for the time being, this beta product looks very promising. I have been watching some National Geographic documentaries in full screen in my Mac, with a very good quality. Much better than what you get in Youtube or Google Video and quite similar to the quality of any DivX or XviD serie that you can download from the net.

The interface is very intuitive and allows you to browse through the different channels and once you have chosen one, you choose which program you want to watch. The playback starts almost instantaneously so there are no long waiting times for buffering content as it happened with RealVideo player.

One thing that has surprised me, is that they are testing advertising technology running short ads in the middle of the video. The experience by itself would not have been disturbing if it weren’t for the fact that the streaming of the ad is not smooth as the streaming of the video. My best guess is that it is due to a low number of sources to share the ad content, but I have no data to support this

Another nice feature of the software is the possibility of running widgets on top of the video. There is even a chat that allows you to comment the video with people who are watching the same video as you! Can you imagine the possibilities of a fully interactive TV anywhere you go?

In the website they have promised that the product will keep being developed and get even better… and I am sure it will, because it is a project started by the same guys that developed Kazaa and Skype, so they know what they are doing when it comes to P2P networks. In parallel to the technical developments, they are working to get more channels and quality content for the network. For now I am very happy to have the National Geographic documentaries for free but I won’t be the one complaining if they put other interesting shows that just take ages to reach TVs in Europe.

I will keep blogging about this experience

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