What’s Joost? I hear you ask. Well first of all, it’s pronounced ‘juiced’ and not ‘Yoest” as my Dutch friend with the same name and I would have thought. Joost is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the web using peer-to-peer TV technology. It’s near TV quality video streaming to a PC or Mac.

I was lucky enough to score a beta test invite from Andrew at the AV Club and took to exploring what has been tagged “the best of the web and the best of TV”. I must say that I’m really not a big TV person to begin with and with its current programming titles like “Hot and Wet strip trivia” and “Bridezilla”, it doesn’t look like I wil be converting to TV addict anytime soon. I know it’s a test environment at the moment, but for everyone’s sake lets hope the live version doesn’t end up a dumping ground for z grade programs that would make the latest Big Brother series tolerable.

That aside, I had little problems with the streaming and I can only assume this will get better when it goes live. I also took to the design and layout of the interface, it seems to emphasise the directional buttons much like those found on a regular TV remote control and comes as close to a lean back TV experience as you can get on the computer at the office.

The other big difference to the box is of course the built-in search engine that allows you to find videos by typing in titles, artist’s names, or keywords. This all apparently works on metadata tags as opposed to just archiving the video streams themselves. The advantage of such meta data is what will set the Joost experience apart.

From Joost themselves: “So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming. Imagine a personalized TV channel that only serves you shows your friends are literally talking about. Or think about the way this could transform programming itself.”

In theory, this type of tagging combined with a back end advertising engine that can pinpoint users by location, time of day, viewing habits and opt-in profile will create what can be argued as “perfect advertising”. Wired goes on to point out that this kind of control will make the network much more valuable to advertisers. Quoting the product development crew at Joost: “We offer targeting they’ve never dreamed about in the TV world and a deeper relationship with customers. Not just deeper than TV, but deeper than most of what you get on the Net. I don’t think anyone really knows what those things are worth.”

I’m watching these developments with interest! In my opinion, as long as the numebr justify the efforts of taking their work to yet another platform, there really isn’t anything else that will stop marketers jumping at this. With US giants like CBS and Viacom already signed on, get ready to be Joost!

P.S - I’m also trying to work out how to get more invites, if successful I’ll throw them out to people interested in having a look.