One of my friends sent me a very interesting news article on the future of Joost and this reminded me that I still haven't posted a review of Joost here on the blog yet.

I currently have Joost installed on my computer but at the moment, the number of channels is very limited and not that exciting (but they do have the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit channel!) and truth be told, the whole program is rather unstable (hence the "beta" label). The program sometimes freezes for no reason and when you want to flip channels, it takes forever to get the channel list up on the screen and then takes a lifetime to get the channel to change. Joost also has a bad habit of slowing the computer down with the CPU usage often hitting 100%. This means that watching Joost is a really big effort and you can't really do anything else on the computer while you watch - to make it run properly, I have found that I have to shut down all non-essential PC programs. Forget surfing the net while watching Joost. Forget doing anything period!

For the record, I have a broadband DSL connection so my internet connection is not the problem here. If you have a dial-up connection, definately forget trying to run Joost!

If they can get the stability issue sorted out and get the channels to easily and immediately come up then they have an absolute winner on their hands. But right now, it's a huge turkey on the computer and as such, I rarely open it. Today, it took 20 minutes for the update server to update my version of Joost and a further 15 minutes to get the channel list up. Finally, it crashed and I had to use the Windows Task Manager to shut it down.

Despite all that, if you'd like an email invite to assess it for yourself, let me know (by email) and I'll send you one. But in my opinion, it'll be a while before Joost performs to an acceptable standard. When it does, I'll review Joost again and I will then probably try to start using it more often.