OK, I got round to trying Joost.

My desktop has Linux, so i couldn’t install it there – Joost is only available for Windows and Mac OS X. Though since it words for Mac, it might be rapidly tweakable for Linux portability. Had to install it on my Win laptop, crappy sound card included.

I was quite impressed by the interface – cool program, easy to use, just like having digital tv in fact. Except you catch the programs when you want, and you can pause and fast-forward at will. My ideal TV.

Unfortunately, the content they offered was crap. The colleague who invited me said the same – after the first amazement at the coolness of it all, you spend about 10 minutes zapping through the programs, and then you switch it off, bored already. Similarity to normal TV there. The definition of the image was not great, a bit like middle-to-low-def divx, but still watchable.

Joost has a ’standby’ option, which means that it’s switched off, but you’ve still got a small icon on your status bar. Since i’m a nosy and suspicious person, i switched on a network analyzer to see if there was still P2P traffic going on.
I first looked at what was passing through when Joost was on, then when it was on standby, and then when it was off. Well, you can guess the result. Standby doesn’t mean off – be well aware that you’re contributing to the greater good of P2P TV-dom. At least, off (exit) means off, no sneaky uploading+downloading happening in the background (the number of packets slowly winds down over a few minutes).

Then i got subscribed as a beta tester of Neokast. The formula is different: the software is not a stand-alone application, but a plug-in for your browser. Nice, i hear you think – so this is platform-independent. Correction. A plug-in for Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher. So i had to use my Win laptop again, and remember to use IE, which i’ve not done since about 2003.

Simply put, there was little content. Just 15 films or so – very clearly a beta, in the non-gmail sense of the word. To the Neokast team’s credit, any content there was, was slightly more interesting than the drivel offered on Joost, but i didn’t detect a lot of activity at all (the live streaming page was inexistent).

The quality was OK – a bit fuzzy, but without blocky transitions. Looked like a different compression algorithm then for Joost – smoother and fuzzier, if that makes sense. Full-screen option was available.

I did the same trick with the network analyzer. First i left the browser window open with the film stopped, and then i closed the browser. Didn’t see much difference, so i concluded they were pretty clean. Also, looking at the IP addresses, the Neokast didn’t seem to be P2P in the conventional sense of the word – exchanges with one IP address only.

In sum, i can’t say which one is better – i just can say that it won’t matter to me if all they offer is crappy wine-tasting programs or travel news.
The first one who plays ‘Down by law’ 24/7 gets my vote.

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