Joost: The project formerly known as Venice

Funny, I really liked the name “The Venice Project”. Oh well. Today they announced they’re Joost. And they’re opening up for a bunch of new beta applications.

What Joost is is basically tv on demand with interactive features. You can browse through the different channels while a program is running in the background, you can chat with other viewers (someone will have to explain the idea of the chat to me though – the way I get it you chat with other people watching the same program, but since it’s on demand you won’t be seeing the same things at the same time…?), add a ticker for any RSS feed you like, and some other stuff.

I’ve been trying the service out for a while, and apart from content that doesn’t really excite me, it looks promising. The content issue isn’t really an issue at this stage, though they’ll of course need better material when they get off beta.