Billed as ‘46,000 hours of video free’, Joost is an evolving collection of ‘official’ video clips, as distinct from YouTube’s collection of official-yet-illegally-uploaded and amateur video clips.
It’s an important distinction, although for most people it’s not that relevant to actually finding the things you want to watch. Unless you’re a fan of tabloid and swimsuit videography, in which case you’re in heaven here.
You see, the main problem with Joost is that 46,000 sounds a lot, but is miniscule compared to the tens of millions of video clips on
YouTube, which also has the advantage of having a dedicated player built-in to every iPhone/iPod Touch’s home screen. Most music videos and movie trailers, for example, which comprise a huge percentage of Joost’s content, are already up on YouTube and just as accessible. Where Joost scores is in the very niche area of Swimsuit models and ‘gag’ videos, with presumably signed deals with a number of suitable sources. You’re liable to get bored watching scantily clad girls (eventually!), and then you’re better off with YouTube by a huge margin.
There are other issues too. I liked the nice high quality Quicktime video streaming, but the seek bar for each video and that for volume weren’t very responsive, rather spoiling the experience. Something, somewhere is not quite right, it seems. The lists of scrolling thumbnails and summaries in each section aren’t responsive either, until such time as the very last image has loaded, giving the user the impression in the meantime that dragging to scroll doesn’t work.
At least the sections do make sense, with a good ‘Browse’ category system that lets you drill down to surprising detail, to find a particular show or movie genre that you’re interested in. And, curiously, dragging to scroll works instantly within the movie lists in this section. A search page works as expected and rounds off an inconsistent application that could do with more development and more content allround.
Subscribe
Retweet
Buzz it
Loading ...