Sunday, March 18, 2007

Not long ago I downloaded and installed Democracy (which will soon be renamed to Miro) as it touted 1000's of free channels. I have to say, and I don't mean to sound like a snob, the content was pretty crappy. I think I was hoping for commercial quality programming and I was jumping the gun a bit... maybe. Anyway today I received an invite to try the Beta of Joost, (formerly the Venice Project) which is the new venture, in case you haven't heard, from the guys who brought you Skype. Because of my somewhat unsuccessful conversion to Democracy I wasn't really expecting much but I think Joost is actually more of what I was looking for in the first place. The app (at least the Mac version) runs full screen with all the usual fancy OS X interface features and is very simple to use, the selection menus are similar to Front Row/iPod and the winning factor... the first show I selected to try was Fifth Gear which had a whole load of clips to watch, there is also a Warner Bros. channel, National Geographic, Saturday Morning TV (loads of old cartoons like Rocky & Bullwinkle) etc.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for with Democracy and if this is all legit content I think that it will be a very popular application.

Jon 10:49 AM Permalink