Thursday, December 06, 2007

Why I hate Joost

So I downloaded the beta of Joost, since I feel a professional responsibility to try these things out and understand what they are trying to accomplish. I came away from Joost profoundly disappointed. I spent half an hour or so watching the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle with my daughter. The good news -- only two problems. The bad news, they are both deal killers for me.

First, the quality of the picture and sound was very good -- most of the time. There were these sudden glitches where the sound began to stutter or skip and the images would falter. With the enormous investment that has been made in this proprietary technology platform I would have expected it to work a lot better (at least as well as YouTube).

But the real disaster is that they seem to want to duplicate the horrible interrupt advertising model of television. We were tortured with terrible commercial for Coca-cola every few minutes of our viewing experience. Worse yet, unlike the sometimes artful way in which television has evolved to interrupt a show with a commercial (at a natural cliff hanger or break in the action) Joost's ads seemed to be inserted according to a schedule -- even if it meant that the ad appeared in the middle of dialog.

Attention Media Moguls -- I am not returning to interrupt driven television programming. And Coke execs? Your ads make me hate your product and your company. Give it up.