Joost in time TV ...Youtube meets P2P meets Skype.

Sponge Bob

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/17/joost/

Joost is an interactive, IP-based TV software system from the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, considerably richer after the $2.6bn purchase of the telephony start-up by eBay.

and Skype does exactly what it says on the can ...bar that irritating supernode cack.

So what is it? Quite simply, Joost turns your PC into an instant, on-demand TV. No set top box is required.
There's really three parts to the technology. Joost operates a server farm to cache the video, manage seeding, and maintain QoS, but the idea is that much of the content resides on people's own PCs.

I foresee more supernode cack there though, make sure you throttles its uplink to 64k and it should behave itself.

Importantly !!!!!

From the outset of our demo, it was clear Joost has cracked some fundamentals. TV runs instantly, full screen and at high quality - there's no lag from activating the TV software to getting something to watch.

Basicallys its myspace or yourtube but distributed. Hmmmmmmm It could catch on sez the Sponge ...now where is that clip of the neighbours donkeys a 'romping' in the fields, eh ??!

watty

They havn't really cracked anything other than allowing people to serve Video by stealing the bandwidth of the users.

Your viewing quality is limited by your own download speed. You can't break the laws of physics. They solve the server bottle neck by using everyones upload all of the time.

So the viewer watching an 1hr pays for upload 24hrs a day for everyone else if their PC is on.

You can't use this at all with ANY cap.

These issues are not pointed out in the Joost FAQ.

Of course it will catch on and lots of ejits will discover in a few days they have used up monthly cap.

Either the users will have to pay more or the ISPs pay more for a Capless BB connection. Meanwhile the providers pay nothing more than an ordinary BB connection.

It stinks.


Most people running Bittorrent don't appreciate that they ultimately consume 100s of times more bandwidth than a straight non-P2P download from a server like ftp.heanet.ie that has paid for its bandwidth.

If everyone setup port forward to their Skype "magic number" the Skype super nodes would not be needed and indeed Skype would only use what each user needs.

Ultimately like Sky's Anytime, Joost allows big buisness to distribute using infrastructure of EVERY mug that installs this, even if that person rarely watches. If people realised what they are giving away, but 99% won't.

Unlike Sky's version of Joost, the BBC version at least warned users that it would be using their upload ALL the time they are online.

Since both Sky & BBBC have used an exactly similar service, Joost isn't even new. Of course the more idiots that install it the smoother and more instant any of these three distributed video services are.

gerryo

Can you block ports when you are not viewing anything , by setting your firewall or router to stop the packets?

Or maybe you could limit the traffic on the app or service, say drop the bw to 1kb/S or something smaller.

I relaise that users are expected to "fund" what they watch by providing feeds to other users, but this way it's a bit more even, you only open the throttle when you are watching, choke it off when you are not.

Fiddly to manage, but some folks just use Skype when they want to make calls, then stop the app to keep the Supernode away. Might this idea work here too?

watty

If you are inside a firewall your Skype does not Supernode. (i.e. Port 80 and port 443 blocked incomming)

If folks do as you suggest (and it will not be easy to do so, gerryo), then Joost will not work.

Skype will OTOH work fine without a supernode if both users setup port forward to their personal magic port and all outgoing open (safe).

Joost REQURIES everyone to be running it all the time for it to work at all.

gerryo

Guess Joost is great for those that have no caps & don't care how much BW is stolen. I'm sure it would be possible to throttle it to a reasonable level, but maybe that's not in keeping with the spirit of the service agreement (if there is one).