Hey I finally got Joost. If you haven’t heard of it yet (seriously, you haven’t heard of it, have you been under a rock?) it is a program developed by those guys that made Skype and Kazaa as their solution for IPTV or Internet Protocol Television.

So far I watched a National Geographic documentary on Everest. It was good, well what I saw of it, for some reason it cut out in the middle and wouldn’t play anymore (it is still in beta, some kinks have yet to worked out). So I changed channels and watched some Snowboarding.

It works fairly smoothly and has some neat features like widgets so you can IM using your gmail or jabber account, chat with other people viewing the same channel, or have a clock on the screen; all of which are semi-transparent so that you can still watch the screen behind it.

So far there isn’t a whole lot of content but Joost have been striking deals with the likes of Viacom so that could change soon. Currently Joost is made up of mostly Music Channels, National Geographic with a few knock offs, a Independent Movie channel, and some sport channels of “X-treme” nature.

I look forward to see where this is going since all of my video content now comes from the net. It has the potential to supplement what iTunes, podcasts, and Netflix can’t give me, surfing (oh and channel hopping too).

I just finished watching my first video, “Dr. Who: The Pirate Planet”. A great episode with as good of quality, or better, than if you would have seen it originally in 1979.

So far they have a wide variety but no New Releases that I have seen. Must be so you don’t cut down your subscription just yet. The video came on rapidly and I could pause it with the space bar (in reality my wireless game pad that I have set up as a remote with the usual media hot keys). It was of good quality and you get one hour of viewing time for each dollar of your monthly subscription. $18 a month = 18 hours of viewing time a month. The quality also changes depending on your connection.

From Netflix:

Tier	Data rate
High	1.6 to 2.2+ Mbps
Good	1.0 Mbps
Basic	500 Kbps

Needless to say I am excited about this prospect. I tried out Vongo for a while as a supplement to Netflix for this reason but the selection of movies and the fact that it took up precious space on my hard drive led me to cancel.

It will be interesting to see how this catches on and what Netflix will offer. As I already have a TV conected to my computer for such purposes the average user doesn’t. Will Apple TV jump on board, or will the rumors from a while back of a Tivo/Neflix partnership come to pass.

The main podcasts I have been watching are channel frederator which is full of original cartoons submitted by a variety of artists, all of the national geographic podcast to get my wildlife and nature fix, and the comedy central stand up clips. I have also been building my French with the French podcast and watching the yoga podcast to pick up some moves. On the occasion I watch the Vintage tooncast to see old merry melodies, popeye, superman, and other cartoons of the like.

So as long as I keep finding good podcasts and itunes keeps offering shows like the daily show, battlestar galactica, and lost I’ll never have to get cable again, which is nice because I’m sick of all the commercials.