Joost Tests Live Streaming

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In case you hadn’t heard, this year Joost joins CBS in offering live access to March Madness. Though I gave up on Joost shortly after it was released from beta, frequent ZNF commentor Todd still checks in. And apparently, today’s live streaming tests aren’t going so well (see above). Test details:

We’re beginning a new experiment to bring Joost’s P2P video streaming live – we’ve done some internal and semi-private tests so far, but in order to offer a stable live service in the future, we need your help. We expect (and kind of hope) things will go wrong … but that’s the only way we’ll find out where the problems are. When you’re testing any new technology, especially one as complex as live P2P streaming, you expect a number of failures, but in order to get a product or service that works seamlessly, you have to break it first in order to find all the bugs and troubleshoot effectively.

8 thoughts on “Joost Tests Live Streaming”

  1. Interesting… I’ve had Joost account while it was in beta and, honestly, have not used it very much. I might be too used to the regular TV+TiVo combo, but I just found content to be too disorganized. It’s the same (but to lesser degree) for Microsoft’s Internet TV beta although Microsoft’s interface seems better and easier to use because I can control it on my HTPC via remote.

  2. I’ll add there was never a signal in the entire hour I was testing it. It’s not like I would watch whatever they were using as a live broadcast for 10 minutes, then it would go down…got that error message continually for an hour. Sucks.

    I have been testing Joost since it was called the “Venice Project” back in 2006. And as a big RDF nerd, I had high hopes for it, with its promise of elegant “annotated television” where I could watch shows my friends have watched and see their text comments in the time line of the show:

    http://icanhaz.com/joost

    Promise broken. All they offer is chat with episodes of Laguna Beach. Epic fail!

  3. Oh, is Joost still around?

    Yeah, I’m being sarcastic, I know they’re still out there, but I haven’t seen anything worth noting from them in a while. I actually finally uninstalled Joost from my laptop recently while I was cleaning up a bunch of apps I don’t use anymore.

    I never liked Joost. I had way too many problems during the beta – more often than not I got an error instead of the content I requested. And the interface always drove me crazy, it seemed to be far, far too ‘clever’ in coming up with new ways to navigate. In other words, I found it completely unintuitive and annoying.

  4. I had the same problem as Todd. I occasionally tried to connect for the first 20 minutes and I always received the same error message. I’m curious if anyone was even able to successfully start a stream (let alone watch for 5 or 10 minutes)?

    This high streaming, at least in theory, is kind of the last frontier for me. I would be very tempted to drop cable if I could get a nice, high quality stream of my favorite team’s games.

  5. Yeah, I was never a fan of the interface. It got a little more organized, but it’s still a “heavy” app – why bother, when Hulu and Netflix stream straight to a browser? Though they do deserve recognition for offering Mac & PC platform parity pretty much from the start.

  6. I got glimpses of video through the test and the Joost team members said they did gain some valuable information from the test and that was the whole exercise was a about seeing if the service could handle a flash crowd not about the content they where streaming that was just there to keep us watching ;)

    I was in the Joost IRC chat (not the channel chat) and the Joost staff said there where a few backend problems that where causing a few issues and the even rebooted the streaming server at one stage .

    I think it was a successful test if they found some bugs that they will now probably fix .

  7. Stopped using Joost a long time ago. I got the email about the P2P but really wasn’t interested. I’ve moved on to Hulu, which is just so much better! I finally got to see why everyone loves Firefly; I can’t believe I didn’t get around to seeing it until now! That and Picket Fences.

  8. Ditto. Initially excited, but there was never anything on, and getting a stream to play was often difficult. Uninstalled it a while back. The world has moved on.

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