Update: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Joost allow­ing unlim­ited invites every­one who added a com­ment and those who leave a com­ment from this point on will receive an invite.

For weeks on end I’ve been patiently wait­ing for a Joost beta invite. Why am I so excited about some­thing that on the sur­face seems like Tivo™ for the web?

There’s an easy answer for that, so let me spill it. Before I do that how­ever, I’d like to thank Paul for send­ing me the invite.

Joost Oozes With Quality

It doesn’t take a spe­cial decoder ring to fig­ure out what Joost does. The offi­cial site describes its func­tion­al­ity quite perfectly:

The magic of tele­vi­sion, with the power of the inter­net built right in. Joost puts you in con­trol, and TV will never be the same again.

This could be con­strued as a bold claim, as if the creators/developers/masterminds (the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Skype and Kazaa) behind this oper­a­tion could not pos­si­bly con­vince them­selves otherwise.

Yet, when you con­nect the dots, eval­u­at­ing the whole enchi­lada for a ser­vice like this (brand­ing, web site and tech­nol­ogy) you can’t help but be enthralled by the polish.

Spec­trums, Rain­bows and Magic

Have you ever looked through a spec­trum? There’s a infi­nite amount of col­ors that appear if you hold one up to a light source. It’s inter­est­ing that the cre­ators of Joost chose to theme their ser­vice around the con­cept of spec­trums and color vari­ety. Although, I must admit they do look a bit like col­ored Kryp­tonite, not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Ear­lier today I was doing my best to describe the pro­mo­tional video on the What’s Joost? sec­tion to a friend. Halfway into explain­ing how cool it was I real­ized it’s just one of those things you have to see for yourself.

At first glance the demon­stra­tion video seems a bit awk­ward, or at least it did to me. After watch­ing it I real­ized it seems famil­iar and that’s because it’s some­what like a med­ley of Bat­ter­ies Not Included, Cocoon, The Last Starfighter and Tron. Like I said, you need to see it first­hand because my descrip­tion just won’t cut it.

Beta Means Slim Pickings

I would say that my only beef with the ser­vice is that the chan­nel offer­ings are slim at best and the video out­put ranges from near DVD qual­ity to sub par Youtube qual­ity. One moment it looks great, the next it just dis­tracts from the over­all expe­ri­ence but I’m sure in time it’ll improve.

As far as the con­tent is con­cerned other than watch­ing some “vin­tage” Ren & Stimpy car­toons with my daugh­ter and a cou­ple Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel spe­cials on lions and pyra­mids, there’s noth­ing else that peaks my inter­est for the time being.

That will change as Joost con­tin­ues to sign con­tent providers but in the interim there just isn’t a lot to con­sume at the moment. Although, this is still in beta so that’s just par for the course. Joost has promised to con­tinue sign­ing con­tent providers; for instance, they just added a vari­ety of shows from providers like Com­edy Cen­tral, VH1 (the chan­nel you switch on when you’re bored, or, at least I do) and MTV.

Beta Invites

If you haven’t expe­ri­ence Joost yet, well, that’s just not right. I’ll tell you what, leave a com­ment and I’ll use the magic of the inter­nets (and a handy script to ran­domly select a num­ber) to choose three lucky peo­ple to send an invite to.

Ready, set, go!