1. Amazing technology timing, Joost was in Beta when everyone realized internet connectivity and user density is finally fast enough.
2. Great social timing, users love online and on demand, just look at YouTube and Launch from Yahoo.
3. Good economic timing, the rest of the world is waking up to the internet, they cannot afford cable, satellite, and fast internet. They choose the latter.

This non-thinking rubbish pisses me off. Joost is the “leader” in the sense that people write stuff about it over here in the West because the founders have used all their marketing savvy to get attention.

You go to China or Japan or Hong Kong. There you’ll find millions of simultaneous users logged on to services like pplive, ppstream, uusee, maxtv, etc. And they’ve all designed their own p2p backends that can stream stuff in watchable quality even to people watching in the West.

And yeah, as someone else mentioned: television over the internet = bittorrent, this side of the pacific.

Well, I can already do this. I bought video and audio cables to connect my Macbook to my TV. Then, I use the remote control that came provided on my Mac and can surf the programs, play and pause them right from my couch while my Macbook sits on the other side of the room…

- the Idea that is now “UnPopular”

- will become “Popular” - how does this compare with Unbox? … by Amazon

TVMama.com and JuicedonJoost.com both are following these developments:

Why have Comcast, AT&T, etc not rolled out their own IPTV solutions yet? Because the network can’t handle it. And even when joost, a pure IP solution is launched, trust me, the network owners will be able to provide a much better “switched broadcast” type product in a few years that will obliterate Joost unless they get some serious content.

IP based solutions are great, but limited to the bandwidth to the home (don’t forget that a 6mbps connection from comcast should be thought of as a 1.5mbps connection with burst potential to 6mbps - ie if everyone on your node is “joosting” it ain’t gonna work.)

Free high definition PC Player = http://www.mytvpal.com

Read: America lags behind Europe and S Korea in watching TV Online

I think the real significance of Joost’s P2P strategy is for CATV deployments where everyone is using a settop box running their software. In this type of environment, you have 100-400 nodes that share a network segment. If each of these nodes is both a P2P relay and storage server, you can do some really interesting things without clogging the upstream network.

Assume each of these boxes has 500GB of disk or thereabouts in 2008 (and more each year), and the system is configured so each program is stored on at least 2 different boxes. This means you have about 25-100TB of shared storage on each network segment. That’s enough for 25,000 to 100,000 hours of standard definition programming, and 2,500 to 10,000 of HD, depending on encoding format.

That’s enough to cache the majority of the stuff that people are likely to want to watch using a brute force tactic. Add other smarts like syncing the set top boxes with Netflix and Blockbuster watchlists, and you can record even more stuff 24/7, available for local playback as needed.

The point here is that bandwidth is not the issue. It is storage. If every set top box is a P2P Tivo, more or less, then you can background record virtually everything within a local subnet, and know that there is a 99% chance you can copy it off your neighbors set top box.

So yes, Joost’s P2P system is broken if its throttled by the CATV provider. But if Joost is in the cable box and CATV network itself, their system will work very well. As with Skype, I think they’re ahead of everyone here, and have spotted something that went unnoticed by most.

The promise of video on the net is freedom from the walled gardens, a place where anyone can be a broadcaster, using standardized encoding and software to be available to anyone anytime. And Google can help me find what I am looking for. So I don’t know how this will play out really, but I think Duncan is missing a level of sophistication in his praise.

And the hype of Joost seems to have died, lately.

I still want to see TV the way I described it a few months ago:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....o-you-want