Joost not quite the revolutionary TV?

As I was just browsing through my archives for a bit I noticed that it was already nearly a year ago that I got my invitation to Joost. I didn’t expect it to be that long already, especially when I recently checked out Joost again it’s hard to believe it’s been a year. Now [...]

As I was just browsing through my archives for a bit I noticed that it was already nearly a year ago that I got my invitation to Joost. I didn’t expect it to be that long already, especially when I recently checked out Joost again it’s hard to believe it’s been a year. Now for those which are completely unfamiliar with what Joost actually is I’ll give a brief summary just to clear things up.

According to their own site they describe it as “free online TV”, in essence this is completely true, it consists of over 400 channels by now with over 20.000 shows according to their statistics. You can watch all of these on demand rather than it being aired in scheduled times like on regular television though which gives you as a viewer more control.

Now is it free? Yes, it is completely free. The revenue for Joost is gotten through commercials which get sent to you just like on regular television except for the difference that here they don’t last as long, it’s just a single commercial.

So, free online television with over 20.000 shows, why not quite the revolution? It’s something you might be wondering about at this point, but the answer is actually quite simple.

Asides from Joost being slow on systems even above the minimum requirements making the application unresponsive thus barely being able to select the show you want to watch the content is even worse.

When you think of television you think of content, you want to be seeing something worth seeing rather than simply junk. Even older series might do, although preferably you’d see all those latest prime-time series since those are what pretty much defines television for many. Another item which you might want to add is the news and sports, the more classical things on television but still watched by millions.

Well, Joost has none of those. The best they have come up with is… Lassie? All their content consists of nothing more than absolute junk, it’s nothing more than flicks and complete rubbish.

They must be changing that you might expect, but by the looks of it that’s just not happening. The addition of junk is still going on, last week’s new content for example consisted of under more Motors & Babes, The sexy clips channel, Great destinations and more of these useless additions.

Problems with copyright are also quite the issue, much of the content is limited to certain areas only. For some people this means that out of the content which is mostly useless already they can only watch a very selected amount.

As interesting as Joost might sound at first, it’s just that great in theory. If you’re wanting to be watching television Joost just isn’t going to be the source for it I’d say, you’ll probably have enough of it within a day due to the extreme lack of content.