Yesterday I spent the entire day substituting Joost in whenever I would usually watch a podcast or watch TV. I’ll let you know how I did my little review and then tell you the results of it.
I spent the first hour of Joost recording some information about it, such as how much data Joost uploads and downloads. I also found out how many commercials I saw during an hour period. The next few hours of Joost were spent finding out two things, how solid the program is (it is still beta) and if there is enough content to substitute cable for a lenghty period of time.
(Sorry About the Blurry Table)
As you can see it downloaded a total of 508 MB of data and uploaded 44 MB. If you have a cap on your download or upload for the month with your ISP Joost is not a program for you. I only saw 8 commercials for the first hour. Only a couple of things bothered me about them, they were significantly louder then the rest of the programing and they are the same commercials. Over that hour I only saw 3 different commercials so They get pretty boring.
The program itself is extremely polished and works very well. I love the interface and one of the things I liked about it was with my Media Center remote I could control the channels so I wouldn’t need a mouse or keyboard to flip around. I didn’t find the widgets interesting at all but I think with time as soon as users will be able to create their own widgets and distribute them they will become more and more useful.
There is a lot of programing but not a whole lot of it is really that good. I spent a lot of time watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Lime channel which has some cool cooking shows on it. Joost does have a channel catalog which will show you what is popular and what is new at that time which I found very useful to find new and interesting shows to watch. A problem that I found is that under the My Channels list it doesn’t list all of the available channels because looking in the channel catalog I found 3 or 4 channels that weren’t listed in the “My Channels” list. I think it would be much better for them to show me all of the channels and then give me the option of removing ones I don’t watch very often.
I didn’t get bored watching any of the shows but I do think that Joost needs to try and get more content on the service quicker so that you don’t end up watching all the shows that you like and then being left with two options, rewatching shows you already watched or watching things that don’t really interest you.
All in all Joost is a great program and couple it with Netflix or iTunes can get you by if you are on a tight budget and don’t really want to throw down the cash for Cable service but you need to be very careful about how much data the program downloads if you have a download cap you will hit it very quickly.