Comments on: Venice Project Becomes Joost http://www.crackunit.com/2007/01/16/venice-project-becomes-joost/ iain tait's blog about things Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:58:14 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Kief http://www.crackunit.com/2007/01/16/venice-project-becomes-joost/comment-page-1/#comment-1761 Kief Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:59:32 +0000 http://crackunit.com/?p=454#comment-1761 I love on-demand, geographically unconstrained access to commercial free TV content, and will become a dedicated customer if they get the economics and content right. My suspicion is that, for mainstream TV programming at least, the content owners aren't going to accept pricing that I'd go for. I need to get the shows I like to watch regularly (around 5-7 weekly series) and pay something similar to what I would pay for Sky or cable. If they charge £3 per episode of Lost (or whatever), it isn't going to temp me. Of course the other possibility is that the content is purely youtube style long-tail. As a techie, and someone who likes to get decent resolution files in a reasonable amount of time, I also hope their p2p protocol is more like bittorrent than Kazaa and Skype. The Kazaa/Skype protocol is fine if the goal is to directly distribute data between points A and B, e.g. what Skype does. For distributing large files to groups of people, e.g. what Kazaa did and what Joost sounds likes it's doing, bittorrent is far more effective. I'm disappointed there's no mainstream video distribution based on bittorrent. I love on-demand, geographically unconstrained access to commercial free TV content, and will become a dedicated customer if they get the economics and content right. My suspicion is that, for mainstream TV programming at least, the content owners aren’t going to accept pricing that I’d go for.

I need to get the shows I like to watch regularly (around 5-7 weekly series) and pay something similar to what I would pay for Sky or cable. If they charge £3 per episode of Lost (or whatever), it isn’t going to temp me.

Of course the other possibility is that the content is purely youtube style long-tail.

As a techie, and someone who likes to get decent resolution files in a reasonable amount of time, I also hope their p2p protocol is more like bittorrent than Kazaa and Skype. The Kazaa/Skype protocol is fine if the goal is to directly distribute data between points A and B, e.g. what Skype does. For distributing large files to groups of people, e.g. what Kazaa did and what Joost sounds likes it’s doing, bittorrent is far more effective. I’m disappointed there’s no mainstream video distribution based on bittorrent.

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