Joost tests Flash based player – 5 days ahead of schedule

Monday, October 13 9:25AM

NEW YORK (Gubatron) — This morning Joost has launched what seems a stealth test of their Flash video player delivering 5 days ahead of scheduled, according to the announcement made by the company the last September 18th when they released a new browser based version of their platform.

There is no press release in relationship to this on their website yet, but the new Flash player is readily available on the web site for Windows, Mac and Linux. It looks and feels exactly the same, and best of all, now all Linux users can enjoy the vast content on our favorite distro (content which I think suits us perfectly as a geek audience)

Also there are no embedding options available as of now. Hopefully it’s just a matter of time, they have plenty of viral content.

Joost could be in more devices = More Viewers
I expect this player will broaden the possibilities for Joost as an ubiquitous platform. Now the possibilities for integration are endless, I’m already starting to think Mobile (iPhone, Android), Wii, PS3, all you need is a flash player on your platform, and anyone out there (if the company doesn’t do it first) with enough spare time on their hands will be able to put together a Joost player.

Now imagine all that free tv spectrum to be released in February 2008 to be used for free internet access, I can see enormous worldwide TV audiences on mobile devices for marketers to start drewling.
This is great not only for Joost but for all the video companies that have enough vision (and funding) to realize these opportunities today. Start gathering your Android teams now.

Other improvements
I also noticed the search result page has a new filtering set of links, that can help you down narrow search results. This is a great improvement, since their search results would yield several hundreds of videos and there used to be no other way but to page through all of them. Now when you perform a search, you’ll see Filters (each with a count of how many videos are available) by Venue, Genre, Sub-Genre, Series, and Runtime.

No more p2p?
Now the question remains, will they ditch their P2P plugin, their old P2P client? If they do, this only means one thing:

100% Flash Player = No more P2P

They had said that P2P users would get content in higher quality than those with the “Joost Standard” Flash version, as you can see on the screen shots, the quality is pretty high for the flash version, my guess is somewhere down the line, they’ll probably decide to get rid of P2P altogether and foot the bill just like Hulu is doing now (which has a growing catalog of HD content). Hopefully bandwidth is getting cheaper, In my personal experience I consider the whole Bandwidth business is way overpriced, because Data centers and Networks can always find themselves big corporate customers and resellers that will pay anything, we can only hope this will change as the technology advances.

Screen shots
Click on the screen shots to see bigger.

Joost 100% Flash Player running on Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Full Screen on Linux Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Flash player on Mac OSX Leopard

Joost

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology (and now Flash), created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).