It sucks when you know, in advance, that you’re going to miss the boat on what seems like really cool technology.

I’ve been reading about Joost for a while now, watching various sites to see how things play out. How it may end up stealing a ton of buzz away from YouTube, simply because the media often likes to play them off each other, even though they seem to have little in common.

But I can’t get over the fact that this is another cool thing that we, in this part of the Third World, are going to be bystanders on. It’ll come, get talked up like crazy to the point where everyone will want to use it — and we won’t have the bandwidth to see what all the hype is about!

I recall reading somewhere that the folks at Joost are saying that it’s going to require a 512kbps connection, at least, and we’re a few years away from that being a “standard’ speed — 128kbps is the norm right now.

Just like it is right now with YouTube — we Pakistanis click play and then pause, go away, wait for the damn thing to cache in the background and then come back in 10 minutes to watch that 30 second clip which, most of the time, proves to be underwhelming.

From the Joost blog: The software downloads about 320MB per hour (as a maximum) and uploads up to 105 MB per hour. The more popular the content is on our platform, the more sources it can be pulled from and the less redundant data we send; that number can be as low as 220MB per hour of viewing.

From what I’ve deduced so far, and the service is no longer shrouded in mystery, so I may just be a little thick, but it’s basically TV-on-Demand on your computer.

They’re signing up content distribution deals steadily, with the Viacom agreement being the biggest noisemaker thus far, so there will be some mainstream stuff to start with, but I imagine that the Joost early adopters will use it for the more obscure shows, since they’re probably all well-versed with BitTorrent and know how to download the latest episode of CSI.

Though I imagine this will evolve pretty quickly, I came across a channel listing at Wikipedia.

The technology works a little like BitTorrent, in that the shows are initially distributed by Joost, but the bandwidth burden quickly gets passed on to users who have already downloaded and watched them, thereby minimising the need for massive server farms at Joost’s end. These are the guys behind Kazaa and Skype after all — they know you don’t use most of your upstream bandwidth, so they’ll use it for you!

It all appears to be really cool in its implementation (full screen, good quality, nice interface, extensible via widgets) and the offering is compelling for people like me who already use their PC for a lot of video entertainment.

TV viewing is a habit and people want to do it sitting in their lounges in front of their big TVs, not at their computer. I wonder how watching CSI on your PC will prove to be a attractive proposition in the short run, because if Joost doesn’t gain traction quickly, it’ll probably be surpassed by something that does it quicker, better, more convenient, etc.

Basically, the key to this thing succeeding will be the variety and quality of content and whether that will be enough of a pull to get users to change their viewing habits and locations.

Technorati Tags: Joost, TV, Television, YouTube, Skype, BitTorrent, Karachi, Pakistan

I’m not an Indian film buff, so have no idea which movies these clips were taken from, but they’re both soooo funny!!

note: WordPress was mangling the embed code, so use these links to view the videos on YouTube until I figure it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Pjo0WjBcs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlZFMnX0xxA

I watched the Leo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamonds, last night and it shed some light on what was happening in Sierra Leone a few years ago. I was pretty horrified. There was a scene where they were axing off people’s hands and arms — the choice was left to the victim, “short sleeves or long sleeves” meaning above the wrist or above the elbow. This was being done so that people couldn’t vote — “The future is in your hands… no more hands, no more future.”

I came across an article today at the NY Times web site that seems to continue from where Blood Diamonds left off. In a nutshell, it’s basically saying that things aren’t a whole lot better after it became difficult to sell conflict diamonds to the west.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people.

“The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

It’s a pretty sad situation for a country that’s selling something that is prized in most parts of the world.

Sitting in Karachi, surrounded by cricket buffs, my ignorance about the sport often makes me feel a little awkward. But I have to admit that Bob Woolmer’s death has suddenly got me curious about the sport. Given how regularly illegal things happen over here and get passed off as normal (or ignored), my first assumption when I heard about the death on Geo News was that someone was behind it, rather than it being something that just happened naturally.

Now, to be honest, that kind of cynical thinking isn’t something that I’m exclusively prone to. We’re a nation of doubters who are suckers for conspiracy theories, because there’s so much more here, than elsewhere, that isn’t on the level.

To read that his death is being stated as caused by strangulation doesn’t at all seem to surprise me in the “Oh my God” sense, but more in the, “Aha, I was right!” way!

You just have to figure that some overzealous fan or player decided that it was the coach’s fault that the team played like shit and lost twice in two matches. There’s even talk of match-fixing (again) being involved. I can hear the speech right now, “Let’s lose to the Irish today guys, because it’ll be fun to make all those gamblers drop a bunch of money.”