That’s certainly a very interesting question, and one that has surely given cable TV executives some sleepless nights, and now probably more than ever.

But the harsh reality for many in the world is the cost of bandwidth. Many countries have ISPs that impose a bandwidth cap on users, only allowing them to download a certain amount of data per month, after which there can be expensive per megabyte charges.

Some ISPs not only charge for downloads, but count uploads and use them to drive your download bandwidth down faster. This is usually to make p2p services like Kazaa and Limewire too ‘bandwidth’ expensive to use, as these services often upload a good proportion of what they are downloading due to their peer to peer nature.

If you are in the unfortunate position of having a download cap, or worse still belong to an ISP that counts uploads towards your download limit, watching Joost TV can be a very expensive proposition.

Joost promises to download around 330Mb per hour for a high quality, TV equivalent experience at high resolution. Joost say that if a lot of people in a particular country or in the world are watching the same program, the data can be spread more widely and can drop the per hour download requirements in the current best case scenario to 220Mb – but in the initial stages 330Mb is obiviously more likely.

On the upload side of things, Joost will upload around 150Mb of data for every hour of TV you watch.

If you watch 10 one hour shows, that’s 3.3Gb you’ve just downloaded, and 1.5Gb you’ve uploaded. Watch a single one hour show for 30 days, and that’s 9.9Gb. If you’re stuck on a 10Gb download limit, you’ve just used it all up watching a Joost TV show every day. Where does that leave the rest of your Internet experience, sending and receiving emails, downloading other programs or new music, watching Youtube or anything else that requires bandwidth?

It leaves you stuck. If you are on one of the cheaper ‘entry-level’ broadband plans, these can often have download limits of 1Gb or less, and with usually expensive per megabyte prices for going over your limit, you can easily end up paying dearly for enjoying the Joost TV experience.

Until telecommunications companies and ISPs can deliver each of us at least 100Gb of download limit each month for a reasonable sub $100 monthly amount, Joost TV may have a massive audience that simply can’t afford to watch – and will be watching cable TV instead.

Joost and Babelgum are fantastic innovations in the world of Internet TV, bringing a new level of quality that finally looks like the real TV we’ve been watching now for decades, with some snazzy interactive and other features thrown in but soak up the bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow, making the much lower quality Youtube the preferred video platform for now with its much leaner bandwidth requirements, even though the vision is far from high def.

So, until the cost of bandwidth is much more realistic, few will truly experience the digital media boost that is Babelgum and Joost, and that is a very great shame indeed – although thank goodness for Youtube in the meantime!
{moscomment}

Tags See All Tags

Alex Zaharov-Reutt  Broadband  Internet  Video  Web