Second impressions of Joost

I've been playing with Joost for a few weeks now and are slowly starting to see it for what it really is: TV played through the internet. Over the weeks I've found a show I liked on the Alliance Atlantis Sci-Fi channel and watched a few episodes of it. The show is not especially brilliant of anything. But apparently good enough to watch three episodes so far, so it can't be that bad.

It's actually very much like watching TV. You flick through some channels until you find something that seems interesting. After that you sit back and enjoy the show. Or you just watch it until it annoys you and then switch channels or switch Joost of entirely.

There are even commercials injected into the shows. And the transition from show to commercial is not necessarily smoothly like on real TV networks. No, on Joost a commercial can start anywhere in the show. Even in the middle of a scene or shot. Technologically that makes sense. But as a viewer it takes some getting used to.

Luckily they are only showing one commercial per block. And of course you can't fast-forward them. As a mediacenter owner that means that I actually watched some commercials for the first time in over a year. :-)

So far I've found one channels that seems to match my interest. I'll continue my search to see whether there's more. But I'm still not sure this is the way I'll be watching TV in the future.

Showing just the right download instructions

When I chose to download Joost on my Mac, I got to a page that showed me the instructions for downloading and installing Joost on a Mac using Firefox. Every screen in the instructions, from the Downloads window of Firefox to the installer in Mac OS X, matched exactly what I saw on my screen.

When I later installed Joost on my Windows PC, I got a similar page with instructions for installing Joost on a Windows PC using Firefox. This time there was a slight mismatch in some of their screen shots, but overall it was pretty accurate.

And I guess if I had used Safari on the Mac or IE on Windows, I would also have gotten a page showing the correct instructions for that combination.

It looks like a pretty small thing for the comfort of the end user, but I imagine a lot of work must have gone into this. Imagine all the platform combinations you have to cover and the number of screen shots you'll have to take.

And all that effort will not be appreciated by the average user. They'll just see the instructions and at best say "hey, those are easy to follow". And that's a Good Thing (tm).

Normally if as a developer we've spent a lot of time and effort to create something we'd like the users to notice that it took time. But why is that? Is that because it's good for the user to notice this new feature? Or do we want them to notice, because we want them to see how much work we've put into it? And why should they care?

I once wrote a post for my company blog about this topic, titled "doing the right thing":

• Did you ever proudly show off your work to someone only to have them respond with, "Yeah... how else would you do it?"
  
  Well I have. And the first dozen times it happened, it annoyed the hell out of me. After spending hours tweaking the functionality so it worked exactly as expected, how could they not see the beauty of it??? How could they not appreciate the effort it took???
  
  Luckily wisdom comes with age and in recent years I've started to realize that this reaction is actually the best compliment you can get. You've solved the problem in a way that seems completely natural to someone who's never seen the solution before. As [any usability expert] will probably gladly confirm, this means your solution should pass most usability tests with ease.

And to me this is exactly what the Joost developers/web masters have accomplished: a solution that works exactly as most users expect it. Of course they shouldn't show a generic instruction page with sections for all operating systems and browsers mingled together. Of course what they did is the only sensible approach. And of course they don't show a message on how good their solution is. Of course this is how we'd all do it, if assigned a similar task and enough time. But I definitely appreciate the fact that they solved it this way and would like to publicly applaud them for it: great work people!

First impressions of Joost

Earlier this week I finally got to try out Joost, which -according to their own web site- is "a new way of watching TV on the internet". I've installed their software on both the Mac and a PC and played with it for about an hour. So far I found it interesting and well executed, but nothing revolutionary.


Ever since winamp introduced their integrated TV channel, it has been clear that it is technically possible to stream video to users on demand. And given that broadband adoption has skyrocketed in recent years, combining this streaming technology with a peer-to-peer network should not be rocket science. I'm not saying this must have been easy, but there is nothing very new about the technology Joost uses as far as I can see.

The end result could be very compelling: given enough providers of good video, it will be an on-demand like TV experience. The problem has always been with finding enough content providers. Looking at winamp today I still get the same types of channels I got years ago: some cartoons, some home made stuff and some cheap porn. The technology is there, but apparently the content providers aren't.

Joost seems very well implemented and it is definitely nicely executed. The interface looks slick, there is lots of content to choose from and the quality is... well... acceptable. But the content they show is content that I could have already gotten elsewhere on the web. Sure, they've brought it together in a single interface, saving me a lot of searching, but still... it's the same old content.

And they don't seem to include content from any of the big players. On one hand it's nice to be able to watch sketches from Boom Chicago in Amsterdam, but what if I want to watch an episode of Friends or Seinfeld? And it's also great to see they've got a channel showing clips from 5th gear, but what i I'd rather see some footage of the big car show we had locally? Even with the amount of content Joost seems to have indexed, it still doesn't seem to match my needs. And isn't that what the internet is about? Matching our needs.

In short: I'm not sure about Joost. Maybe the brilliance of it just hasn't hit me yet. Or maybe I'm just not their target audience. If either of those changes, I'll let you know.