Joost is heavy on the juice

A BETA TESTER told us that Joost - what it used to be called the Venice project - works really well. Well, she mentioned that the service works really well but that the quality is questionable. This IPTV project now commercially known as Joost is available for cherry-picked beta testers.

You need a broadband connection and with it you can chose from dozens of channels broadcasting some TV shows and music videos. The list of content is set to grow and the content is interactive. You can watch it and chat with another people watching it or you can read the news and write your own notice board. This works via Joost plug-ins.

If you have the limited bandwidth connection, you might have a problem. Playing 10 hours of Joost will eat 1GB of data. It will eat 150MB of your upload quota as well. The picture quality according to the source is sufficiently good but not great. It looks good when you watch it from distance but there is some room for improvement.

Unlike Youtube, this is more like interactive internet TV than a video-sharing engine. You can pause, skip the content but you can not record it, the source adds. It seems the Venetian architects will need improve the video quality of the service, while also reducing its bandwidth requirements - and that could be a tall order. µ

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