Sunday April 8th was a pretty big day for myself and millions of other viewers out there. I know what your all thinking, The Sopranos and Entourage kicked off their respective seasons! But that’s not what I am getting at. Today I received my first Beta copy of Joost! A new Internet TV medium for those unfamiliar with the product. Anyways, it has all the bells and whistles that were promised and overall I think the technology is getting there. It was a very fun user experience. The presentation was great, it looks cool and sleek, and the channels were easy to find and navigate. The widgets were fun too! I even got a glimpse of some non-intrusive advertising when I was loading a new channel “Presented by Garnier”. I see tremendous opportunity with this product but first things first here people.

There are some issues that I have serious problems with and I don’t think I will ever be able to get over them unless they are fixed. To begin, I take issue with how clear the picture is. I mean I gotta say it’s way better than expected, but for the sake of the future generations of television watchers, digital signals are just not going to cut it. I need my HD and so does everyone else.

The video performance is still a bit dodgy, and the lack of HD content is still unfortunate: Any program that decides to launch full-screen to play back video really ought to have video that doesn’t have lots of scaling/compression artifacts. [1]

The next thing was the programming and promotion. I mean I know that Joost is just getting their feet wet so I will cut them some slack, but I think they are going to have some serious issues with viewership if they don’t get better programming. They need to get the ball rolling with some great shows on their network, but how will they promote them? A traditional network would run promotions within the context of other shows like it. Here Joost will have to seek other advertising mediums other than On Air Promotions to get the word out or use Viacom as their crutch. Additionally, what is going to happen to the traditional framework of TV? People like their news at 6pm, their primtime at 7pm, they plan their days around this stuff so how can Joost break that mold or fill that niche? There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered and it makes me nervous for Joost.

I am really excited for Joost and the future of television, I just think they have some things to work out. The truth is that we are a few years away from this being practical. Joost needs some early adopters and some market mavens to realy make this thing work, I just hope people catch on because the product is really good. Check out the Beta version for yourselves and see what you think at Joost.com

[tags] television, joost, marketing.fm, marketing, iptv, internet television [/tags]