The net is overflowing with people begging for a Joost invite – just saw a post by a guy that was offering 50$ for one, someone pretended it was her birthday today, and another was ready to sell his stepmother.
Apparently, Joost (from the same company as Skype) is not the first nor the only initiative of this kind. But it’s certainly the one with the best viral marketing.
P2P TV is a fantastic idea. It’s perfect – everyone watches TV (more or less), so everyone can share. Plus if you get content that’s attractive worldwide, you might get good QoS 24/7 (since enough peers will be sharing).
Of course, a good question will be whether the ISP’s can keep up the traffic if everyone starts watching. Cringely tells us they can’t. So they might really start to lean on net neutrality, to give lower priority to your tv packets (if they can be recognized, which they probably can).
Though reading an interview with guys at Joost, they don’t seem to be worried about that, because with their revenues, they can buy the bandwidth they need (and probably screw the competition).
Also, Joost offers TV by big players. I do hope that something like P2P tv will extend the broadcast capability to more low-budget channels.
I wouldn’t give 50$ for a Joost invite, but I might pay to see some grassroots off-beat and wacky programming.