The new browser-based Joost, which we wrote about two weeks ago (screen shots here), launches this morning. The new Joost still requires a plug-in to facilitate P2P transfers of files (reducing Joost’s bandwidth costs and making high-demand live performances feasible).
There are lots of new community features in the new Joost, which we outlined in our previous post. Joost isn’t just moving to a browser format. They’re also creating a video based social network complete with Facebook-style activity streams that shows you friends what content you are watching, commenting on and “shouting.” See the video below:
Next Month: Joost Goes 100% Browser, No Plugin
Joost is also listening to feedback. Next month, says CEO Mike Volpi, Joost will offer a version of the service that doesn’t require any download at all. The new version, called Joost Standard, will have the same social features as the plugin version and will give access to all on-demand programming. The plugin version of the service will give users access to high definition programming and live-broadcast shows. Some international markets will require the use of the plugin to offset high bandwidth costs.
Both versions are free. Most users will likely just download the plugin over time, but this is a great way to introduce the service to more users without any friction.
Who gives a flying fuck about these guys? When are you going to report on real companies Michael, you tool. Lately after TC50 your posts and comments suck big red donkey dick – much like I’m sure you do on the weekends.
Well, you gave enough of a “fuck” to post a comment… so your attention was clearly captured.
/anon
juiced is a great name for a company. Meg whitman will probably buy juiced for billions to entertain during auctions.
I mean look at skipe , the joost guys deserve a olympic gold for salesmanship.
I’m really curious about the technology behind this stuff. XUL version of Joost was pretty neat. Are they going to implement RTMFP and use FMSs? If it’s possible then everybody is going to make a P2P TV platform. It’s not that big deal. They should also stay on desktop too. Good luck!
100% Flash = download required.
And no matter how often I update Flash, it continues to suck nine big ones.
So, Joost will try to crash my Chrome browser at least once every day, and will succeed in crashing other browsers multiple times per day.
Alas…
Sounds like you have a virus. I wouldn’t blame Flash for something you got downloading porn.
won’t it use the flash plugin? oh wait, flash is ok…other things are not…i forgot how much webtards love adobe.
Loved how many music videos are available.
The tabbed interface right next to the player is almost there in terms of functionality but not at all in terms of good user experience. Having search results there is good but it sucks that the interface doesn’t let you know it has been disabled while an Ad is being played, you get all impatient and do a search on the top, and then the page reloads from scratch, this means you don’t get to see the Ad and you loose whatever you were watching.
They have lots of social features, but you can’t shout a video to a friend inside joost.com you gotta remember their emails.
No chance of editing or removing your own comments either.
The video to get people to sign up gives the brand a very friendly flavor, would love to see more ads like that in the future or a series of funny shorts with them, congrats to whoever did that.
Will wait for the flash version, wonder why they didn’t go with it when they decided to dump the old client. Companies like Joost are the ones that should push towards Flash + P2P and help start playing the field for everybody in the video business (not having to spend a $1mm on bw costs)
It’s a move in the right direction. The 100% flash based one is very welcome; but kind of undermines the point of Joost in the first place (or at least it’s great innovation). I think if they crack how to actually handle the p2p stuff without a plugin, allowing everyone to stream HD without eating through huge bandwidth bills they are onto a winner at last.
I for one am the kind who as soon as firefox pops up a toolbar asking to install plugins to view content tend to just navigate away.
The social features were inevitable I guess.
Joost hasn’t died yet? Who knew.
I wonder if they have a shot at taking traffic from youtube.
The content still kinda sucks. Its better than most of YouTubes’ content, but it can’t compare with that of Revision3.
The Popular list is filled with music videos, some “Babylon 5″ and “The Legend of Bruce Lee”. I’m sure some people like that stuff, but I would never call it quality content.
Personally, I like Joost, I was one of the first to get invites, but I soon got bored rubbish content, years later (not even sure how long!) and its still the same.
Hi Ashley, Thanks for checking us out. actually we do have revision3..
http://www.joos...mgo/t/Revision3
try searching and looking around the EPG (Show/Music/Film) lots of good stuff there…. and we’ll be adding tons of new things as we come up on our October Flash version.
mv
Hey,
Cool, I do see your adding a lot of content, and I didn’t even notice the Rev3 stuff, so I hope to see quality content in future. Of course it comes down to where you source the content from, there are tons of tech shows on the internet, but not much else at the moment; ideally I would love to see recent Lost, Prison Break, … episodes on Joost, but it seems like NBC and all other US studios are publishing exclusively to their own services (Hulu, …), plus of course I’m currently in the UK, and every country out of the US gets no love…
ty for the reply!
@mv,
I was a Joost tester back in the day, we even talked to your content directors in London about developing original content with our comedy talent, this all pre-Hulu, iPlayer etc.
Aggregating World’s Strongest Man and every music video ever made, is great, for a few minutes, but ultimately the opportunity here is to create original content for these networks.
I talk a lot with brands about developing branded content and it always comes down to ‘how do we distribute’, partnerships with players like Joost (and Hulu) is the way forward.
You need an original content commissioner, get producing your own formats for syndication rather than sublimating others.
Come talk to the talent and give Joost a chance to shine. If you don’t Hulu will and it’s only a matter of time before the first show launches on the iPlayer before the mainstream channels.
Wow, that animated/talking tv as soon as you enter the site is so annoying…
Joost’s strategy is better in that they are going to give users a reason to take the P2P plugin to get better quality. However, the issue remains, Hulu will continue to have more content and a clean user experience… so what do we need Joost for again?
I wonder if they’ll downgrade the quality for the flash users, instead of giving HD quality to the P2P. As it is, the current videos (which are a lot) are not in HD anyway. Will they be able to duplicate their entire catalog? I bet most of the content available can’t even be obtained from the owners in HD anyway.
That would be the strategy; use Flash for its (now infamous) “ok” user experience and Joost P2P to give HD.
No one cares anymore about Joost. Those guys are like 2 years late! Online video fight is over.
Over!?!? – it’s barely just begun. Look how much has changed in the year that Joost has been around. The next year is going to bring more of the same.
You’re delusional. Go see some comScore numbers.
The Comscore numbers are not reliable for Joost becuse they where client based but yeah the numbers where low …a web based Joost will provide real numbers for the service ,
Hey, so who won??
100% Flash plus the ton of crap it just downloaded to my Mac, you mean?
New Joost is almost as bad as New Facebook. And that’s bad. New bad.
So, what makes Joost so cool? That it only has “professionally” produced content? What does it mean for something to be professionally produced?
That its not amateur produced, lol.
Glad to see Joost finally dump the download app and go with a web app. Looks cool however I’ll stick with http://www.invision.tv that launched last week.
This site sucks donkey balls.
Does anyone else have the same problem on the mac? I can only use it on windows
Crashes my browser 100% of the times as soon as the site has finished loading.
(Yes, I have the latest plugin as of sep.18.2008 9am)
I hope it works as they say…
Hi!iyzm! http://xvjgrtlg.com xcyfx qtutq http://pgrdruqr.com hokgl omfsk
Hi! http://mwdxyxwb.com hiwxl voehp http://lfkofwrk.com rzszk hwhpk
Wow. Many people harshing on Joost. I may be out of the loop, since I only get to play at home. My company allows almost nothing in terms of Internet. But I see the whole Joost P2P strategy as groundbreaking in terms of delivery mechanism. Even if it’s only a piece of the IPTV puzzle, it looks like a step in the right direction.
Make Joost Flash based?, Joost in a browser? I kind of said this 14 months ago, which in internet time is about 5 years ago.
http://www.paul...abs/joostbeta1/
The new Joost player is nice, but why would Joost ditch all its functionality (chat,menus,widgets) when it goes fullscreen, is Joost now totally walking away from the Television experience?
With the new emphasis on social wouldn’t it make sense to put that into the player itself.
No embeddable player????
Why isn’t there an Adobe Air version of Joost?
Looks like I have a high level outline for my next writeup
Paul your not the only one that was screaming at them for not being in a browser and to use the plugin for higher quality ….and they really needed social functions for the whole TV viewing thing to work .
At least next month you will be able to use the Joost video on your Joost clone site when its flash based
I still think Joost is a few years ahead of itsself and it could be interesting when all TVs have ethernet ports or wifi and are internet enabled and Joost can better postion itself as TV on the Internet
Hi:
We realized we had a problem with Mac FF – but it should be fixed now. See note from our head of engineering:
http://blog.joost.com/ or just go to download: http://www.joost.com/download/
Joost goes a little bit in the direction of last.fm. “social” components… recommendation features maybe soon… so now just the content is missing. and thats the biggest problem. Last.Fm made it cause they lived in the “grey” area of content / copyright usage… Joost is in the green area… and there is no chance to compete… to finance good content with full copyrights is too expensive… we will see…
http://www.digi...lwaveriding.com
It looks good except that I suspect if users will be comfortable with downloading a plugin to their browser. I wouldn’t do it, especially in a market where you have tons of other options to discover and watch your favorite shows. Even a small company like http://www.cruxle.com has everything that a user needs .. in fact more than what Joost can give. But we need to wait and watch!
cruxle.com team has been out spamming comment sections without identifying themselves (AKA astroturf) of popular blogs all over the place.
Hey Chris Matthews, didn’t you RTFA??? It will not require a plug-in next month. Get it?
Very disingenuous cruxle.com!!!
Loved the quality of video in full-screen. Very Neat.. also the cartoon at the start was quite funny..
wonder if they are planning to allow renting of movies?? it makes perfect sense.. P2P+Movies… why didn’t i think of that before… Oh wait… never mind..
That’s a huge step backwards – AdobeFlash is a proprietary so-called modern technology, which doesn’t even run on not anymore so modern platforms like 64bit operating systems.
+ It is only available for platforms Adobe is willing to support – what about mobile devices and their often different system architecture like ARM etc.? What about other operating systems like *BSD?
+ AdobeFlash really sucks when it comes to accessibility in different ways – as AdobeFlash is a closed container, no searchengine is capable (without dirty tricks) to index AdobeFlash based websites. Disabled persons aren’t able to use AdobeFlash based content as it isn’t presentable by a screen reader.
+ AdobeFlash is just a defacto standard – the fact that everyone uses it, doesn’t mean it is well documented and freely available. Just the same as the MS Office formats.
What more to say? I could continue like this forever – but in my opinion – this was the worst thing Joost could ever do.
You are incorrect on a few things:
1) I run 64bit XP and use flash
2) Adobe released crawling capabilities for the search engines a month(s?) ago
3) I use Flashlite on my S60 Nokia phone
There is a common mistake made here. right now it is flash + back end plugin. they will shift to 100% Flex next month from what i can see. that or they are going to use the very best high end Flash 10. funny enough. i think they are committing a mistake yet again. they could have launched with a 100% browser version now if they had gone with a Silverlight 2.0 version. this only makes the transition slower and what they lack is precisely time. still wish them well. there is a comparable startup to what joost is aiming at. it is called DNAstream and it is from spain.
Actually Silverlight sucks huge, that’s why smart people don’t use it.
WTF it installed a System Preference pane and that it was going to run something in the background draining my battery. After installing make sure to go and uncheck that keep joost running pref pane then trash delete it with a right click.
ps -ax | grep “Joost”
kill -9 PID
Lovely. Great site.