Joost

described as "internet TV for real"

Joost is a closed TV system for the internet, as compared to its open alternative Miro [1]

Description

From Wired:

"The vision: universal TV, running on a hybrid P2P platform—millions of exquisitely networked PCs fortified with traditional video servers. Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium.

the most cost-effective way to move video, music, and other large files over long distances is to distribute the task among a network of users—peers, in computerspeak. Indeed, a peer-to-peer network actually gains efficiency when a howling mob of would-be viewers suddenly logs in, creating exponentially more paths for the data to follow. To date, P2P networks have been used mainly to facilitate downloading, as with Kazaa and BitTorrent. The engineers in Leiden are taking the same scheme and applying it to a different purpose: streaming video directly onto a user’s screen." (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/trouble.html)

How it works:

"After Joost makes a show available, the first users to request it (A) query the network at large (B) to see whether peers can provide the program. If they can’t, the request goes to a content server (C), which streams the show, interspersed with individually targeted ads, directly to each viewer’s screen (D). While the users watch, short segments of the show and the ad are saved to their local hard disks (E). In this way, the entire show and a variety of ads are seeded throughout the network. So when another user (F) requests the same title, that show, along with a targeted ad, comes not from the server but from the network, one segment at a time. Once again, fragments of the show and ad are stored to the new user’s hard disk (G), ready to be streamed to others." (http://www.unmediated.org/2007/02/joost_tv_on_the.html)

More Information

A comparison between Joost and Miro at http://www.getmiro.com/articles/miro_vs_joost.php