A Day in Paradise

I played with Joost way back in January when it was still called “The Venice Project” and beta testers had to sign NDAs (although that didn’t stop a lot of them). Back then while the technology was great, due to the number of users the quality was mediocre.

I got into Joost again at Stella’s request, when she met someone at the library who wanted an invitation.

I installed joost this evening on my 2.4ghz/1gig Vista Home Basic which is connected to my 32″ LG LCD TV and acts as our “Media Center” and not only is the quality great but the selection has grown to include some real shows (currently watching LEXX).

For those of you who haven’t heard about Joost, it is created by the same people who brought us Skype and works using a peer-to-peer model. Peer-to-pear media streaming is drastically different from the server-based media streaming which we are seeing from various news sites, as well as sites like youtube.com. Before YouTube’s acquisition by Google, they announced that they were spending $1 million on bandwidth alone.

Through using Peer-to-peer technology Joost allows the its software to communicate with other copies of Joost software and distribute the media between themselves. Using traditional file serving each additional user viewing a file creates a larger burden on the server, using P2P each additional user becomes another server in the “swam” and shares that file with other peers the initial seed server load is lightened.

I had an interesting discussion with Stella about how the technology behind Joost would handle streaming live content. Because of the P2P nature of Joost, it would be fairly difficult to distribute truly live content without reverting back to the original server based media serving. That is assuming that Joost is only sending data to my computer which I request and am watching.

If my Joost client can receive data that I am not watching, it would allow the main Joost servers to ensure that all the shows that they are streaming can be delivered in real-time and equal quality and if Joost wants to deliver live events this would probably be the only way that this would be possible.

Anyway… I am VERY happy with the progress that Joost has made, and am looking forward to see how it will move forward.

Oh yeah, and the DRM issue isn’t an issue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 3:57 am and is filed under youtube, Movies, Internet, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.