This is JOOST for you

The Venice project (Baaima N.V.) of a time gone by has been on my watch list since day 1. Now its called JOOST. It is IPTV to your computer, through the web, hassle free. If there is any DRM in it, it is user-transparent. Its fun. So its not HD yet, but at the moment i cant write alot about HD content since there is such a short supply of it. Its basically 800x600 but scales nicely.

I fully expect these IPTV types to offer an HD premium service for the likes of me at some point, so i pay attention to whatever is out there that actually works.

http://www.joost.com/

.... go there and download it, its fast and free.

If you need an "invite" token because of locale or circumstance, click the button to the left, because you should see it. I recommend that you have a good internet connection that does 800kbps or so and a nice big screen, nVidia 7600GT DVI.

I have tested nearly all the download and on-demand players out there, even the ones that make you pay before they prove anything to you ( or fail miserably with windows DRM errors ). I know this stuff well now. I have followed Joost since day 1 and it stands out as the easy best-of in every regard... hence Joost is the top of my I Like This Stuff list.

Sci-fi, the brilliant lunacy of LEXX, it is a click away.There are dozens and dozens of categories though must be a few thousand videos, movies shows and whatall stuff in there. Check out LX.TV also, my pals in NYC doing a great job there.

Note - Broadcast TV digital resolution is actually a bit LESS than the resolution delivered by JOOST, so if you play this full screen on an HD TV you will quickly forget you are on a web connection. Someone in the room tried to use the TV remote to turn up the volume... (chuckle) it took a couple of minutes to realize that the sound control was on the PC connected to it. There's your proof.

See a Brightcove Stream by ALL Things Digital with JOOST:

ON DEMAND web delivered tv is here its better than much of what cable is doing right now ( though i expect that to change- Comcast has started loading up its free on-demand library with fresh stuff )

There are caveats. They have great deals with high quality distribution like Warner and National Geographic, but those licenses are regionalized, meaning you dont get everything available globally just yet. Its just my humbe opinion, but if you are aware enough of what the state of the art is you will find JOOST heading there at every turn. You Tube proved that first-to-market is not required for critical mass acceptance ( take that AOL, Yahoo etc ), just make it easy and fun and it will get there by word of mouth, and social network adoption. Click the Invite, go for it. - Ad delivery is lower right of screen in a small clickable, and segement interstitials that generally are less than 30 seconds. Go Army, Nike, no problems with that.

Compression artifacts seem to come and go in the video quality, the stereo sound is generally excellent. Buried inside Joost code is all kinds of special extras, some are turned on, that can let you chat, there is a Speex codec in there so i'm guessing the future holds a lot of connected multimedia social features. Personally i would like to see something like playlist bookmark because there is so much stuff in there i would like to quickly get back at another session.