A Cajun-Asian View

Yes, I am now watching NHL hockey action on Joost! Most of the games from the last series of the playoffs are available for viewing on Joost, skipping most the commercials1 and all of intermission breaks. Outside of stoppages of plays during play and the occasional replay, it's pretty much nothing but constant playoff hockey action. Nice stuff! If I need a break, it's just a matter of hitting the spacebar or pressing the pause button on the on-screen display pause the hockey action until I can get back to it. This is much closer to the concept of on-demand TV programming that I have envisioned.

1. 1. Joost will show a 30-second commercial at a few stopping points during the games. I only remember seeing 2-3 such commercials on an entire game, though.

John on the Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog, while talking about Joost, also mentioned an open-source alternative called Democracy. Though Joost definitely has the commercial edge, Democracy does have a leg-up on Joost in that they already have a Linux client (Joost has it in the work) and that it's open sourced. I'll have to check into it. There's a Democracy package already in the Ubuntu repositories, too, so it shouldn't be hard to get installed on my Linux laptop.

Well, I got an invite to the Joost Beta earlier this morning, and got to watch the pilot for Stella while getting ready for work! Unfortunately, that was this morning, before the onslaught of new users wanting content came in. Right now, no programs are working, and the Joost team has admitted that their central servers have stumbled off the blocks. Oops!

Via stick on the AnimeNFO forums.

Joost isn't exactly a new concept, but it looks like somebody is at least trying to do over the Internet what Tivo simulates now for TV and the older VCR used to do; allow you to watch what you want, when you want to, but this time, it's on-demand instead of having to wait till the show airs on T.V.

Looks like they only have Beta Client for Windows XP and the Intel Mac O.S. X, but PPC Mac O.S. and Linux clients are in the works.

It's something to keep an eye on, that's for sure.

While I'm thinking about it, this is something that I would think LUS should look into while building up the services they will supply over fiber.