Joost for everyone!
By Linda Forrest
Yesterday, Joost, a peer-to-peer streaming TV service, launched its public beta and the blogosphere is aflutter with comments – some positive, some negative but most fall into the wait and see category. Web-savvy folks have been beta testing this system for quite some time but now, it’s open to everyone.
As with most new content aggregators on the Internet, only time will tell as to whether it succeeds or not, but I’m inclined to agree with Smithick, a commenter on the New York Times’s Bits blog, “Content is king. People will put up with a crappy experience if they can get the content that they’re looking for. Joost will only take off when you can find a majority of topical, popular content on the site.”
Such is not the case at the moment and unless the site quickly supplies users with the content that they want, I’m afraid it will suffer the fate of other once promising P2P sites that couldn’t find a way to rationalize high-quality content with worldwide licensing and copyright issues. YouTube‘s popularity is due in large part to the illegal uploading of copyrighted content, though the Google powers-that-be have quelled the practice considerably since acquiring the site last year.
The idea of allowing users to access the television programming that they want to see, when and where they want to see it remains, for all intents and purposes, elusive at the moment, but with so many vying technologies, PVRs, myriad set-top boxes and P2P TV sites, it’s sure to be resolved in the near future. Stay tuned!
