After using Joost for about 14 days.  It’s time to write down a bit about my experience.

They still have troubles with the heavy load.  Sometimes we got connection problems.  Also the rating doesn’t work every time.
The content is still not much.  OK, you have a lot of music clips, documentary’s, etc.  But no real life streaming of programs.  All of them are short clips (some more than 30 minutes).

The quality is good but not very good.  In full screen you still see that they use a lower resolution.

Also, a friend of me who I invited had a full mailbox.  He has received a message from his provider that all new incoming messages will be rejected.  So he hasn’t received the invitation.  Now there’s no way to resend the invitation.  This should be an option.

Another issue is that when installing Joost under Vista, you got an overview how your PC is rated against the minimum specs for Joost.  Joost wants to have DirectX 9, Vista has DirectX 10.  Still Joost tells you to upgrade to DirectX 9.  Although this is an issue with more programs under Vista .

A little tip if you have two Joost accounts.  There seems no way to switch between those two accounts.  This is a solution for it:

Under XP:

• Go to your documents and settings
• Choose your user
• Go to the application data folder
• Choose Joost and then profiles
• Choose the .default dir
• There you will find a file credentials.txt. 
• Rename or delete this
• Start Joost and you will be prompted again for your account.

Under Vista:

• Go to users
• Choose your user
• Go to the app data folder
• Go to the roaming folder
• Choose Joost and then profiles
• Choose the .default dir
• There you will find a file credentials.txt. 
• Rename or delete this
• Start Joost and you will be prompted again for your account.

But I’m thrilled that I can play around with Joost.  And I think it will be great in the feature as they are adding new channels in the future.  The UI is very good and flexible. The average speed is good.  The data transfer is also reasonable. A nice feature is that you can chat with other people about the program you are watching.  I also like it that when you close the application and reopen it after a day or so, you go further with watching the video where you had dropped out.

A nice feature, although not very stable at the moment, is watching Joost over your wireless network.  What I did was using my media center PC which is connected with my home cinema set to go to Joost.  And yes it works, but sometimes I got the error “This show is currently unavailable”. So it seems that it doesn’t work perfectly at this moment.  But as Joost is still improving its network maybe this will work much better.  I said this, because I always copy the DVD’s I’m buying on a network HD and see them using my media center which connects to my network HD to play the movie and this works fine.

BTW: Will this be a hype or will it be the future of interactive digital TV? We will see… but my opinion: It’s the future.

Oh and I still have invites over.  So go to this article and leave a comment if you want an invitation.