I wish Joost…

It’s been a couple of weeks since I first installed and sampled Joost.  I haven’t had much time to play with it since then, but I had some free time this morning, so I decided to give it a better look and I thought I’d write up my impressions.  I’ll use a bulleted list to gloss over the fact that I’m not giving this much thought.

  •  I Like Rocky and Bullwinkle — I don’t think I’ve watched them since I was 14, but Joost has one episode, and I want more.
  • I wish it were easier to add channels — I originally though there were only a couple of dozen channels, but then I tried clicking on a little non-button I discovered in the corner of the channel list and discovered at least a dozen more.  Now that I know, it’s easy to find, but I know other people have completely missed the additional channels
    joost-channels.jpg
  • I wish it were easier to remove channels — Some of the channels I added are real duds.  I can right click on them in my channel list and choose”remove” from a popup menu, but nothing happens (an obvious bug).  To remove them, I have to go into the list of all channels, view the channel and click a remove button.  Simple enough, except a lot of the channels have similar names and logos, so figuring out which is which is a pain in the ass.
  • I wish it were easier to find out about channels before adding them — At best you have the name of the channel and a short description to go by.  Unfortunately, the short descriptions are unpopulated.  This is inexcusable someone on Joost’s team is clearly involved in vetting channels for inclusion.  They should write a short description even if the video content provider doesn’t come through.  There are other glithces with the channel descriptions too.  Often, Joost shows the description for the last channel you looked it.  It can take 5-10 seconds for the description of the next channel to show up.  There are other annoyances too.  There is no way to scan through the new channels, you have to look at the description of one and then go back to the list, and unfortunatley, you end up loosing your place in the list.  When looking for new channels, you really should be able to jump from channel to channel, and when doing so, you should be able to see a little bit about the programming in the channel, perhaps even viewing the clips.
  • I wish the ads were inserted more carefully –Joost seems to insert an ad at a regular interval, but the break rarely coincides with a natural break in the narrative of the programming.
  • I wish it had more stuff I wanted to watch

Ok, enough bullets, I’m going to get some coffee.

One thought on “I wish Joost…

  1. Jigsaw hc

    I’ve been playing with the beta and I missed that option ot expand the channels too. Guess I’ll have to check those out.

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