Joost gets back on our radar with iPhone app

Men in Black playing on Joost's new iPhone app.

If ever there was a Web service that experienced a rapid fall from grace, it was online video start-up Joost. What started out as a much anticipated new service ultimately fell short of expectations and has recently struggled for attention. Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost's iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost's 46,000-plus videos for free.

Say what you will about Joost's library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary--after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn't a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.

I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.

Even though Joost appears to have a really slick UI (in many ways it does), it breaks some of the conventions for UI design set forth by Apple. Flicking to view the next page of search results does work. However, it does not slide over as you would expect, rather a spinning wheel is displayed while the next page loads. Joost also did not implement the incremental find that we have all grown accustomed to for searching.

For me, Joost's iPhone app falls just short of greatness. I really like what they are going for here, but I would certainly like to see more content added to Joost's library and support for 3G at the very least, if not EDGE. Even though the videos appear to choke at times, even over Wi-Fi, 3G should be more than capable of streaming video.

I hope that Hulu and Netflix, with their expansive content libraries, are paying attention to what Joost is doing because they are both prime candidates for this sort of mobile application. I get excited just thinking about having access to all of those videos (almost) anytime I want.

[danrice]

Joost's support for 3G or Edge has nothing to do with their application. It is a restriction by AT&T. AT&T advertises Unlimited data with their iPhone data plan however it restricts any application that tries to stream data to the phone other than YouTube and it also restricts applications that are over 10MB in size from being downloaded. AT&T needs to remove the restrictions and allow streaming over it's network.

[mrcjacobs]

Saying that AT&T restricts any application, except YouTube, that streams data to the iPhone isn't totally correct. I currently have Truveo, AOL Radio, Pandora, Simplify and FStream on my iPhone which I have used to stream video and audio to my phone well in excess of 10MB and have yet to have my service throttled or cancelled. Joost could have easily added the ability to stream over 3G and Edge had they chosen to!

[fighter_of_C]

This App needs ALOT of work. It would be a great alternative to YouTube, but for now Joost crashes over and over. (Yes I have rebooted my iPhone after the install.)

[Penguinisto]

So IOW, Joost needs to shell out AT&T's massive licensing fees in order to stream over 3G or EDGE.

[eltaco420]

SLINGBOX!!!!!!!

Lose Joost, Get Orb. Streams Movies, Music Vids, Pictures and Music off your computer thats sitting at home, does it over WiFi, 3G or edge, and if you have a TV card, you guessed it, will stream live TV from your computer to your iPhone. www.orb.com to get the software for your puter at home and then the app store to get Orb Live.
This is what the iPhone was meant to be!!

[reddawnz]

AT&T Blows with their WiFi requirement. They won't even let you download a song from itunes without WiFi. I can see how my 4-7MB song would choke their unlimited data service.

[Cromartie]

I tried the Joost iPhone app & it worked very well. Would like to see it break the WI-FI umbilical cord though.

[brickman5721]

For the information of everyone here, Joost is a peer-to-peer application. If they maintained the app's p2p nature in the iPhone version, it's no wonder AT&T didn't want them on their network. That would place a ridiculous load on both downstream and upstream bandwidth. Please try to understand why something is the way it is before commenting on how dumb it is for being that way.

[stevesmith121]

you can use the voipover3g app from cydia to trick any program into thinking that its on a wifi network. just know that at&t will notice if your data usage is over a few gigs.

[stevesmith121]

edit

at&t "unlimited" plan is limited to 5GB/month