Joost's possible advantage is that it's going for professional content from the start (user-generated programs won't be accepted, though small production companies will be able to contract Joost to 'broadcast' their shows), funded by targeted advertising. The goal is one minute of ads per hour of content, according to an interview published in Wired. This could low enough to avoid viewer frustration, while the targeting and scarcity factor might be sufficiently attractive to advertisers to yield sufficient revenue.

It seems that like BitTorrent, Joost achieves high net download speeds by fetching different blocks of the file from different peers. Unlike BitTorrent, Joost provides servers of last resort, so - theoretically - every block of every show is always available. But to get the aggregate speed needed to stream high-resolution video, you need plenty of peers. This implies that the content offered will be aimed at Joe and Jo Average, as items in the 'long tail' don't play well under this arrangement. If they arrive in less than real-time, you're back with the stuttering that characterised previous generations of Internet video. In contrast, the asynchronous 'download then watch later' model used by Democracy means it doesn't matter if it takes several hours to download a one-hour show.

The other disadvantage with Joost's on-demand model is that it assumes lots of cheap bandwidth at the user's end. According to the company's blog, Joost downloads as much as 320M per hour and uploads up to 105M per hour. If you're watching a popular channel, you may only consume 220M per hour downstream. Good quality video means lots of bits, even with H.264 encoding.

Many broadband plans offered in Australia, the UK and presumably some other countries have caps that would be quickly exhausted: someone on the entry-level plan offered by Australia's biggest ISP would exhaust their monthly quota with an hour of Joost viewing. Readers in the US, Japan and South Korea are welcome to quietly smirk at this, and bask in the knowledge that advertisers are desperate to reach them.