Oct

12

Joost…

October 12, 2007 |

TechCrunch has an other gloomy post about Joost up. Erik Schonfeld argues that Joost’s major competition isn’t from any specific site, but from Adobe inccoprorating the H.264 codec into Flash 9:

Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds. That means YouTube videos will look twice as good—and those will likely remain on the low end in quality.

Good point. Joost used to have superior video quality. It was really the only thing they really going for themselves. I always found the widgets a bit too gimmicky and the selection of videos wasn’t really interesting to me. Once the excitement over Joost waned, I never went back to it.

YouTube has a simpler interface, which allows me to find and switch content fast. Joost has a nice, but cryptic and slow interface. Big turnoff for me.

Besides that, I always thought that the barrier of entry for Joost was too high. You need to install a separate program which then eats up a lot of bandwidth. Instead, today, ABC has HD streaming of its shows. It’s a very simple plugin install, too, but I don’t have to register and it doesn’t run in the background 24/7 and the video quality is superior to anything Joost has to offer.


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