Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Joost an IPTV killer

For those of you who have never heard Joost or its previous name Venice Project it’s a P2P technology based TV Client. I have been a beta user of this for already 4 months now and have been amazed by it in all respect starting from usability to quality of video to ever expanding feature set. I am not the only one who has been taken over completely by joost experience Blogosphere is full of such stories. My Idea for this post is just to put my perspective and thinking when it comes to its use case and its potential to be a real IPTV kind of technology killer .By the way right now Joost Beta usage is only Invite only basis but I have couple of Invites left for Joost Beta testing so if anyone is genuinely interested leave a comment to this post with your email address or drop me a line.

Joost is yet another startup by Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis they are same people who started Kaaza and Skype both products created wave and disruption in Music and Telecommunication Industry .Joost is their attempt to do same for TV industry I would say they have almost done exactly that .Joost uses P2P technology the same that is behind Skype and Kaaza but mixes with great TV like user interface and Internet ability to interact and communicate using social networks .In all it uses best of TV combines with best of internet and delvers it on optimized & cost effective P2P network. I would live rest of product experience to you to experience your self.

I read some blogs where people have connected PC to 37 inches LCD TV to watch Joost and their feedback has been extremely positive and their were really amazed at the ability of Joost Software and content to scale to bigger screen size without much compromise on video quality .So my belief is that if Joost or some one comes up with iTV kind of device to connect TV to internet and delver Joost on TV without any hassle (like Vonage does for IP telephony) then we may start to see joost being a real traditional TV displacer .Joost has required features set and technology to deliver really personalized TV content and also unable instant communication with their social network both of which is not possible using tradition Broadcasting TV technologies.

That leads to the title of my post if joost can deliver all and even better than what IPTV has promised what is need of expensive IPTV kind of technologies .The only reason I can think of is that IPTV though is expensive to roll out offers traditional big Telco’s (like Verizon, France Telecom etc) required tool to fight Cable TV providers who are in turn entering Telecoms domain by providing broadband and voip connection via cable. So basically IPTV is technology to support traditional Telco business model but not something that would really provide something new value for customers that cheaper alternative technologies like Joost can’t provide. So I hope finally Joost or similar technology finally survives and not IPTV kind of technologies.