Skype Founders Develop Media Streaming Tech 69
[RnP]Venom writes "It appears that after selling Skype to Ebay, Skype founders Janus and Niklas haven't been resting on their laurels. As reported by ZDNet, and the International Herald Tribune, they have been hard at work developing a new TV streaming application called Joost. With as little as 6,000 people currently testing the project details are a bit scarce, but if it does remotely as well as their Phone/IM success, it could be a real treat. From the IHT article: 'Joost may eventually try to move onto television sets, but the company said it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer. Similar to the Skype model, Joost users will download free software -- this time to help them browse for channels and clips they're interested in. One of the company's executives, Henrik Werdelin, said in a videotaped interview that Joost aims to keep the quality of television programming, its picture quality and its ease of use, but improve other aspects.'"
56k Modems? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bittorrent and the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it makes sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
These are the same guys that did Kazaa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype for the curious
Nothing to get juiced about (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe it's just my imagination kicking in... but don't we already have media streaming already?
When Skype developed their phone/IM software, voice over IP was in its infancy. Skype was leading edge stuff. However, the internet has had video streaming for a while now. I don't see how this is going to fly, unless they're cutting some deals with the studios to get some content, or have some spiffy new compression algorithm.
More reasons for Net Admins to curse (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Content? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What? They want it to be shit? (Score:2, Interesting)
streaming has it's place (Score:2, Interesting)
or rather, it would have it's place if it's current implementations didn't suck so bad.
i wish that some provider (other than bittorrent) could come up with a way to get releases out on par and on time with a DVD release. most movies i want to watch once or twice and then move on. renting from the video store is ok, but there are logistical hurdles such as avalaibility. if there were a service that could put movies on my HTPC within a day or two of their respective DVDs dropping, i would be quite interested.
the way the system works now, i have to get a disc from netflix/blockbuster online or go to the video store and rent it, which would work if i could get the disc when i walked into the store, but if it is a very recent release (less than a week) it's out of stock and i have to wait. my alternatives are to get a rip of some sort from bit torrent, but there are 0dayz issues with that much akin to the avalability issues i have with physical media. unless there is a screener or the DVDrip hits the scene before the retail release, the wait is shorter, but involves a bit more work (download, seed, extract, maybe even patch and/or encode, then burn) which is fine for something you want to keep, but is a bit involved for something i'm gong to watch once and hand off to friend.
so, if i could get a cheap stream with little or no wait, within a day or two of the video hitting store shelves i would be interested. if the quality of the film warrants it, i can obtain a copy later by other means and under other terms based on convenience and price (BT, rent and rip, used/bargain bin, or gaffle a friend's copy), and in the rare case of an epic classic, pay retail for a copy or a kewl box set. but for TV series and disposable releases like "dude where's my car?" i just want to watch it when it becomes available and move on to the next thing. that seems to be where streaming from the internet comes into play.
the problem with the current crop of stream/dowload.on demand services is that they all suck. they either lack selection (vongo), lack timely release (in the case of PPV and VOD from the cable company) or require some sort of phone home player that i don't want on my HTPC (everything else), and/or cost as much as a video store rental.
I'm a beta tester but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry wish I could say more.
it does suck (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems web"masters" might test against different browsers, but they sure don't test against different connection speeds or with lower quality even marginally older equipment. It's likie a t a minimum you have to be on a cable modem with a 21 inch screen or they don't want you to use your page at all or something. Screw that! I remember seeing pages where it took more than a minute to finish rendering if you wanted all the goodies to show up. sucks. A real "master" could make it so a much wider range of people using different machines and connection speeds could use his pages.
Then,if all you want is the text, it still sucks, the "print this page" low-res version (even if they have it) can't be found until after you download the full page. I wish there was an automatic plugin and standard for that, so if you mash a link and have low res selected it would just redirect there. Why isn't this out there yet? Seems pretty useful. Maybe the disabled community could force the issue or something, seems a natural for them as well.
I think they should make all of these alleged "masters" (I call them web manglers) test against dialup speeds on a 15 inch screen with some machine from around 5 years ago. Those era computers are still way common. Either that or follow "useabilty" guidelines, that helps make dialup useable, like stop with the lame javascript links and images with no alt text. Is it all that hard really to provide real normal links and some alternative text for the images?
Anyway, lookup "links-hacked", try that for a generic browser instead of FF on slow dialup speeds. Even if you have the horsepower in your machine, the slow download speed makes it painful to use full bloat browsers (FF is full bloat no matter what anyone says, it just is) on full bloat webpages. It has some tab action and will render images. I've used it on old pentium 1 machines before with 16 megs RAM, works great, speeds things up considerably, moreso than any other browser I have tried. It's not perfect but it is darn useful.