Joost advertising

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

So Joost have signed up some more advertisers.

While having some more big names advertising is good for Joost, I'm a little troubled. All the ads I've seen so far on Joost have been short logo & tagline affairs, placed between programmes. A return to 30 second ads, even in very short breaks, in the middle of programming is going to feel much more annoying.

[Via digg]

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Joost comes up short for me on two fronts:

• they don't have programming I really want to watch – although that could be changing
• the quality of the video simply is considerably worse than all the other television I watch; I doubt they can afford to fix that until they deliver more content using the peer-to-peer portion.

For me the cleverest thing they were doing was the short-form, unobtrusive ads. I hope that experiment hasn't failed.

I'm pleased they're finding a niche, and I'll continue to play with it out of curiosity. I can't see them competing on choice and quality with HD content recorded from air, and niche programming distributed by swarm downloading.

BitTorrent-backed feeds enable cheap distribution of proper HD content, providing you download the content ahead of time. That's technology that's working right now, and businesses trying to compete will need to be better than the alternatives – on choice, video quality and flexibility for how and where it's watched.

And don't get me started on in-vision advertising during programming – I've seen too many instances where it has obscured parts of the plot! Designed nicely it can work, slapped in by some distributor it's just irritating.