The men behind Skype and KaZaA have designs on your viewing habits - and the advertisers will love it

Fancy a peek at Joost? Well, you’ll just have to wait until the summer when the online TV service is due to be unleashed - but for some invited users, a beta of the service is already up and running.

The Joost service is already a fully functioning online TV network of around 400 streams of programming available to some 14,000 testers. TV over the internet is not new. What is new with Joost is the fullscreen image showing a high-resolution picture and full-length programmes.

Twitch the mouse and a control panel pops up. Under the row of on/off and volume controls is a second bar, “Joost suggests”, directing you to any of 18 channels. Under that, a third bar reveals the programmes on the 18 channels. Click on a start button and the show you have selected begins to play. A fourth tier of the control panel contains a search box for those tastes not catered for by the corporate selection.

Going live

When the service goes live - it’s hinted that it will be at the end of June - it will be free with no subscription or fee. Crucially, the service is peer-to-peer. Choosing this delivery system is a smart move; Joost is a software house that does not have to bother with banks of servers gobbling money and needing maintenance. Its users take care of all that.

And that peer-to-peer (P2P) nature gives a clue to its origins. Joost is the brainchild of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who were behind the P2P file sharing service KaZaA and the P2P internet phone service Skype, which has attracted millions of users and was sold to eBay for £1.3bn.

The founders say that when it is up and running, viewers will have thousands of programmes to choose from on up to 100,000 channels. This sounds ambitious, but the founders’ reputation is a formidable one. Zennstrom and Friis are on the A-list for this kind of innovation.

At this stage in the beta, the bundle of mostly mediocre telly programmes in their current offering seems to be technically credible. At the moment with Joost you can hop from tropical fish off the coast of east Africa to bad US-made comedies, and even a Russian film or two.

But Zennstrom and Friis have a surprise up their collective sleeve: they are not just offering TV. This is the internet, after all, and this is Web 2.0. Each screen has all of the functionality of a website and users can generate much of what goes on the screen.

Original News and More :

http://technology.guardian.co.uk

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