So, first impressions of Joost.

It’s pretty. A very slick application, transparent, dissolving menus, simple, intuitive menu overlays and EPG.

The quality is ok. I guess not everyone can have 8-16 meg broadband to support HD content (the UK’s average is around 2 meg at the moment)… suspect this could come in time. On my 22″ monitor, its a little fuzzy. The TV content isn’t all the same size either; they could add VLC’s ‘crop’ function to make all the content as full screen as possible depending on the picture orientation. That’d be nice.

It’s a little jittery. For me, anyway. Despite my ludicrous broadband connection I found a couple of channels (GameStar and Green Day) had a couple of pauses during the segments of the programmes I was watching.

The content, is, erm, lacking. Don’t seem to be too many channels natively, and my limited surfing isn’t unveiling a lot at the moment. But there’s probably a way to access everything on YouTube or something, so I’m clearly missing something. And its a beta, anyway, so good chance more will come before a public launch. The search function is pretty good.

It’s pretty interactive. The ‘My Joost’ button will make watching random TV channels at home alone an oddly kind of social. Not really my thing, but, hey, I see the value. I love the random pop quiz questions that seem to be coming up around the music videos.

I already wish: there was an easier way to channel surf. That I could blog directly from Joost, embedding videos accordingly. That there was a way to ‘favourite’ videos (just found the ratings widget. And all the other widgets. Gosh this is good).

And that’s it for now. More to come if it occurs to me.