Joost doing Live Tests
Somehow, Joost seems to have lost momentum over the last year or so. Last year, around this time, there were steady rumors about really impressing content deals which supposedly were just around the corner. But somehow, it just didn’t happen.
Then, in relative silence, the service became much more stable. The client (OSX/Windows) became much more usable, video streams started to playback almost without hickups and the whole user experience improved a lot during a sequence of interface improvements.
At the same time, network enabled widgets were opened up to third party developers, and a few interesting ones were released indeed.
At that time I was really interested in a widget which would post your currently viewing details on Twitter. Such a widget was written indeed, before I even got started to work on it, but vanished tracelessly in the mean time. Being too busy myself, I lost track more or less.
But now they are testing something new: live broadcasts. Today is the second of test of a series, and I have to say that the quality is decent. Video and Audio stream almost flawless, only sometimes slightly out of sync with one another.
This could be a nice way out for Joost: if the content deals don’t happen fast enough, there are lots and lots of live events waiting to be broadcast at low costs. As long as the target audience is not too small (for advertising revenue, that is), this would be another nice example of the long tail at work.
Update: Leo Simons just tells that there exist a similar widget which posts your watching behavior to Facebook, so that’s pretty cool. And he tells a really funny story about our Dutch lunch habits: eating a plain sandwich witch cheese or “Hagelslag”, oh yes, that is so true!
[ratings]
