Remember 2006, when Joost started delivering previously recorded TV shows to your computer for free? But then in 2007 they just seemed to disappear. Well they are back into the streaming media industry, but this time targeting the mobile market in the form of an iPhone application.
On Friday, Joost officially announced an iPhone app which allowed users stream any of Joost's 46,000+ videos directly to their device for free. While not a revolutionary idea, streaming movies and TV shows to your iPhone was only possible using the YouTube app - which mostly provides skateboarding dogs and drunk college students. The video quality is also better thanYouTue, since these are Hollywood-produced movies not user-created videos.
While a fantastic concept, the product is self falls quite short. For starters it does not follow some of Apples UI and gestures conventions, which mean that some gestures won't yield the results most of us expect. They do have a search feature, but it is not an incremental search. And now here is the deal breaker... this application only works over Wi-Fi!
How convenient would it be to watch part of any movie or TV show while commenting or during a road trip? Some public venues do haveWi-Fi hot spots (such as airports and coffee shops), but the bandwidth is typically not great. The most common place you would have reliableWi-Fi access is most likely your house... which also has a computer and a TV.
Another reason the application falls short in my opinion, is because of YouTube's recent update to include wide-screen videos and full-length MGM films. YouTube is already supported on the iPhone and can be used over 3G and EDGE. Lets not forget why YouTube made this move.... which was in response toHulu (website that offers short ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies for free in the US) which is not available in the iPhone since there is not flash support (yet? ). So is Joost just late to the party? Or do they still stand a chance if they up their game?
News source: cnet news
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