Oh I remember this... I think I still have the beta stand alone app installed somewhere...

I used to try it every now and then... The streaming sucked. I don't know what bandwidth it required (the image quality didn't look like it would need much), but it was completely incapable of working out how much it should buffer in advance to provide smooth playback.

Result, 10 seconds of video, 20 seconds of waiting... 10 seconds of video...

I would say "repeat until end of video", but nobody puts up with that for a whole video.

Come to think of it, I don't think I even watched a whole video when it did actually stream (wind blowing in right direction etc), cos there wasn't anything worth watching!

Without content it's going to be pointless... And given that BBC, ITV, Channel4 etc all have their own view on demand system (which do stream quite nicely), I don't think they'll be able to get it.

I enjoyed the original Joost, and miss it, even though I didn't watch it often. I loved the Aardman cartoon channel (and so did my kids), but a lot of the other content was stupid stuff meant I suppose to appeal to geeks, like the Swimsuit channel or whatever.

I never had any trouble with the streaming (though latency was sometimes long), and the underlying idea was brilliant: distribute the bandwidth needs of broadcasting over the whole network, so that broadcasters only needed a thin pipe to get the stuff out (like Bittorrent). But that plan depended on getting critical mass, which they never got, alas.

Maybe they shouldn't have started off with a closed system, and just let anyone broadcast.

Gotta agree with Steve - using Joost was akin to using Real Player in the mid-to-late 90's. Buffer... buffer... buffer... buffer.... And that was with a 10Mbit cable connection with NTL.

Add to this the fact that their content library is abysmal and always has been.

At a time when YouTube showed what could be done (still some buffering but nowhere near as bad as Joost, and plenty of varied - albeit unlicensed - content even if it was limited to 10 mins duration) Joost was a painful experience no matter which way you looked at it.

I remember there being a big hoo-ha about the Skype & Kazaa founders being behind Joost.... just goes to show that in cyberspace nobody gives a flying fuck what your past achievements were.

I, for one, won't be sad to see Joost finally go tits up.

Last time I looked at Joost the stuff I actually wanted to watch was "unavailable in your region" or however it reported it.

Waste of time.