After having seen this just pop up in my inbox I decided to immediately check it out and I’m honestly surprised by the changes. Ofcourse there are again a couple of keychanges and bugfixes which are worth mentioning: Search has been given the sprite treatment, improvements include info panel stays open as the results are scrolled [...]
After having seen this just pop up in my inbox I decided to immediately check it out and I’m honestly surprised by the changes. Ofcourse there are again a couple of keychanges and bugfixes which are worth mentioning:
- Search has been given the sprite treatment, improvements include info panel stays open as the results are scrolled through.
- Adverts now have overlays, click the top logo during an advert and the interactive overlay will come up.
- Channel Catalogue is improved and now includes all Channels targetted to the location of the viewer.
- Duration of each Show is now on the info panel for the show as well as the EPG.
- Show duration on EPG is now in words, 50 minutes, 1 hour, 30 minutes; instead of numbers.
- Trivia tracker introduced, delivers timed messages on supported shows.
- Improvements generally in delivering video, sprite performance, etc.
Not all of these are as interesting if you ask me, like the adverts having overlays I personally couldn’t care less. I can live with commercials ok, but I for sure as hell aren’t interested in them enough to click on the overlay toggler. The graphical user interface changes and fixes are a nice addition though, they just make the overall application look better and more professional, although to be quite honest I must say I don’t really like the theme; it is much to simplistic. Would have expected more from our buddies over at Joost.
Having the show duration in a verbal manner and trivia on certain shows is nice on one side, easier to see the length of a show and the trivia is a nice addition of information about what you are actually watching, but neither is a real change to which you’ld say “Wow! I was really waiting for that feature to come in!”
Yet again new CoreAVC video decoder is being mentioned, now I don’t know whether they yet again updated it with another version of CoreAVC or this was simply an addition to the e-mail but the performance increase this time isn’t as noticable as it was last time. I actually have the feeling it turned out slower than the previous version, especially the GUI.
But best of all there has been added quite a lot of content and a few channels, let’s take what the e-mail had to mention about this:
- Documentaries from National Geographic
- Loud noise and fast cars from the Indy Racing League
- Healthy living programming from Lime
- A variety of reality series in the Lazy TV channel from Endemol
- Cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle in Saturday Morning TV (Classic Media)
- A lineup of independent film makers from IndieFlix
- More reality TV with the Bridezillas series from September Films
- Video gaming tricks and reviews form Gamestar
- Comical, irreverent and edgy programming from Bite TV
- And cool new Bollywood music videos from Savvn
This combination of new content and channels is absolutely awesome, a wide variety of new documentaries coming from National Geographic Channel and cartoons to be seen on Saturday morning TV including famous titles like “Casper - The friendly ghost”. Also we have got to see the first movies from what I can see on the IndieFlix indepenent film channel. If you ask me this addition of channels is the number 1 improvement which came in this latest edition of Joost and with an improving amount of content and channels it definitely starts to look a lot more promising.
Now it’s just to wait till the day we can all be seeing our favourite shows including the great hits like Prison Break and the latest movies on Joost as well, but perhaps one day this might become a reality. Seeing National Geographic content appear is already a nice step forward as well, Discovery Channel and the rest of the Discovery network should be the next step if you ask me.
For the people which are interested in an invite in Joost I must unfortunately dissapoint you all as I still do not have any invited to Joost available and there still is no sign of when I will be handed out any.
