This post’s author, The Media Patriot, is a fellow consumer who enjoys music and television but condemns DRM. His pseudonym pays homage to the original participants of the Boston Tea Party.
Remember back in the Autumn of 2006 when the hotly anticipated “Venice Project” promised all that it’d do for television, what ebay and Skype did for auctions and phone calls? Well, here we are two years later and after much disappointment, Joost has released a new version of itself called…drum roll…New Joost.
New Joost is supposedly a “browser only” plugin that let’s you watch Joost content in the browser – but’s that’s a bit of a misleading statement. New Joost downloads and installs a 6MB version of Microsoft C++ Runtime Environment onto your hard drive.
As much as I would like to share my New Joost experience with all ZNF readers, I cannot since after installing the plugin, CPU usage spiked at 99% for several minutes and crashed the browser to an unrecoverable state. To add to insult to injury, after killing off the hung browser, the plugin was still running siphoning off my bandwidth to power all the other people using Joost.
The Joost blog promises an all Flash, no local anything version coming in October, but it may be a bit too late since Hulu has pretty much filled the niche market Joost hoped to dominate all those years ago.
Have you tried the New Joost? Write a quick note in the comments with your thoughts.
Not sure what they’re using on Mac, but Joost installed a Firefox plugin. Thinking it’s Java-based. It didn’t bring my browser down, though it did impact performance and I couldn’t get videos to play – though the logo swished around and I could navigate content. But I’m in agreement – these guys are late and they are done.
Hulu has won – there is no doubt.
“Hulu has won – there is no doubt”
Does YouTube count as player in the same space Joost and Hulu are in?
If one could aggregate the content of all three into one place what would it be called? HuluJoostTube?
I thought the original Joost sucked, so I’m not inclined to bother checking out the New Joost.
Major fail. It’s all about content and Hulu & other network sites are better than Joost. I just wish there was a simple way to get all of that media on TV while bypassing PC…
No interest sorry. Original version sucked, and there wasn’t any content worth watching anyway.
With all the networks online, plus Hulu, Amazon streaming, iTunes, TheWB, etc I don’t see why I would bother with this.
Sorry, FAIL.