Will Skype founders destroy Youtube with new net TV service Joost?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 16 January 2007 18:13

Your IT - Entertainment

If you want to be part of the beta, you can go to http://www.joost.com and sign up. You have to wait for an invitation to be issued, although thousands of people have received said invitation and have signed up to download the software and see for themselves just how much of a boost Joost gives to online TV.

After signing up you’ll receive an email with a link to click, but sadly this doesn’t get you in – you still need to wait for a further invitation. There is a message that you can find friends already on beta who can send you a beta-tag to jump the beta wait queue. Joost also promise that there will be interactive features in the future, so all-in-all, it sounds pretty damn interesting.

So far, reports indicate there’s only a small amount of content, which includes music videos, documentaries and sports programming, and what is there is supported by advertising in the traditional way, which you’d expect. But now that “The Venice Project” is finally out there in beta form, but we’re assured this is all just ‘trial programming’ and when the service actually launches in a few months time we can definitely expect some content to impress!

There are competitors out there claiming to be able to offer similar experiences, and can anyone doubt that Google, with Youtube, or any of the other video sharing companies out there, aren’t also on the march to improve their video offerings with much higher video quality?

Whatever eventually ends up happening, we can be sure of one thing: receiving high-def video through our computers has arrived, and pretty soon, low quality web videos will finally be a thing of the past.