Viacom goes with Joost, but can you afford to watch?

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 23 February 2007 03:25

Business IT - Technology

The announcement that a variety of TV shows and movies from Viacom will be available via the Joost peer-to-peer network sounds great - why subscribe to expensive cable channels if you can get the content for free - but it's not that simple.

The first stumbling block is that most people purchase bundles of channels from their pay TV provider. If the shows available on Joost are part of the basic package, you're no better off. Why load up your internet connection when the same content is available via cable or satellite?

One answer would be "on demand" but the widespread use of PVRs and even low-tech VCRs means people are already used to viewing asynchronously.

This may have an impact in countries with low rates of pay TV takeup, but unless Joost can get access to "killer content" (which usually means premium-quality sport such as English Premier League soccer), MTV, Comedy Central and VH1 won't do the job.

The next problem is that internet bandwidth isn't free. In markets like the US where "unlimited" plans are commonplace, ISPs have based their pricing on certain assumptions about what the average customer will do.

Joost uses up to 320M per hour, so if you watch 20 hours a week that's pushing 20G per month on top of your existing usage (unless you're substituting Joost for what are euphemistically known as "alternative distribution channels").