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