Last night instead of getting my eight hours of beauty sleep, I stayed up way too late to play with Joost, the newish P2P-TV streaming program. There’s been a fair amount of buzz around Joost since it launched last year, mainly because of their hard-to-come-by invitations to the beta program. But as of Monday, Joost opened their digital doors to everyone – and I mean everyone. I was just barely able to get on to the site yesterday to download it. Once I did, it was quite evident how many people were doing the same thing. The load times were pretty slow and some channels weren’t “available.” Even so, I was able to put a few thoughts together on the program and its possible impact on digital PR.
The good:
• The design of the program is incredible. There’s a side bar of categories to choose from. Once you choose a category, these transparent widget-like objects of all the available shows come up. They’re fairly easy to navigate and upon first glance do seem to be appropriately categorized.
• Searching for something to watch is a snap, as is changing channels. The transparent widgets allow you to still see through to the program you’re watching while searching for other channels. Think of it as a very sleek picture-in-picture.
• You can’t beat 15,000+ shows. With Joost there is no excuse for saying “there’s nothing on.”
The not-so-good:
• Load times are ok. Joost is incredibly popular right now, so I’m sure much of the lag is due to that. However, it’s something to keep an eye on. There’s nothing more annoying than getting into a show and having it time out on you.
• Joost is really heavy on the advertising. Many sites with streaming capabilities make you sit through a 30-second spot before taking you to the goods. Joost has short commercial breaks just like traditional TV, but takes it a step further by having random logos pop up in the margins while you’re watching a show. They were annoying and incredibly distracting. They also didn’t seem to be related to the content of the show or targeted to me as a user. Advertisers take note: Joost ads need to be modeled more after Facebook’s targeted advertising.
The undetermined:
I see potential for PR involvement with Joost, but not in the way you might think. While the blogosphere is abuzz with what the program could mean for online PR, I say that Joost is still just TV. Just because it lives online doesn’t mean it’s 100 percent in our realm. Traditional agencies have always dealt more with broadcast, so I see Joost as falling under their umbrella. This doesn’t mean that online PRs shouldn’t be involved in working with Joost, but I see this as being more of an opportunity for collaboration between traditional and digital rather than an either/or situation.
Having only been open to the public for two days, I’m sure they’re getting a lot of feedback. You can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on future Joost developments. In the meantime, I’ll keep on “Joosting,” but for entertainment purposes only.
Shameless company promotion: Cross-posted over at Blogworks.
