Joost, the peer-to-peer TV sharing application from the inventors of Skype and Kazaa, has signed up more than a million beta testers and is on track for an end-of-year launch, its co-creator has revealed. Finally, the whole world will get to see what a great service Joost is, which in my view makes a mockery of the shoddy and poor quality videos available on other services.
At my ISP managing our bandwidth costs is becoming almost a daily battle as we try to ensure that the majority of our users receive the quality service that they pay for. I imagine that many ISPs will be having sleepless nights between now and Joost’s launch because the application is very bandwidth heavy, with around 400MB/hour being transferred.
The launch of services like Joost and the BBC on-demand iPlayer later on this year, are only going to make things even harder. There’s already been considerable backlash to the traffic shaping policies of ISPs like Virgin Media in the UK, and I’m sure there’s even more to come.
