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The podcast should be available as an audio download a little later on, but not sure about the video stream, as Ben’s upload speed is rather restrictive and uStream was having troubles catching up – but we’ll see.
On other ‘online media’ news, I happened across an email I received from Joost. Now, I downloaded and installed Joost on my main PC around 6 months ago, and played around a bit with it then, but basically, its never been run since. With the email, and a spot of free time on my hands, I thought I’d have another look at it.
I went to the website and downloaded the latest version, and while it was installing had a look around on their forums. Ideally, I’d prefer a Media Centre version of it so I could run it on my Media PC that’s connected to the television. However, this is not to be. The only have 2 versions – one for PC and the other for Mac – and both of them are stand alone applications. I can’t even navigate the software using the media centre remote control.
Basically, Joost is a rival to TV Tonic. However, in my opinion, TV Tonic is the far superior product. It has a stand alone application (although it only works with Internet Explorer – a browser independent version would be good) but more importantly, has a Media Centre plugin.
The Joost interface is clumsy and not very intuitive – it can only be navigated with a mouse, the channel icons are very oversized (they could better use the window real-estate to describe the channels in more detail) and the sorting and grouping of the channels is very haphazard.
The most annoying feature of Joost, is that it ONLY streams video live from their servers. With TV Tonic, you select the channels you want, and it downloads them for you to watch whenever you like. The TV Tonic service application also allows you to set time restrictions on when it can download as well as throttling the bandwidth it uses. This is especially handy for people who havepeak and off-peak download restrictions where they can set the service to only download in off-peak hours.
All in all, I think until Joost offers a Media Centre plugin, and allows downloading/caching of its content, its a big ‘uninstall’ from me.
In other online media news – check out this Microsoft advert – it was made around 12 months ago, and I appear in it twice – look for my beady eyes peering out from on top of my monitor LOL!
Oh – and dont forget to have a look at the new page I’ve added – TV Shows I Watch