Saturday, June 09, 2007

What's Wrong with Joost

While I generally like the idea of Joost in general, I have a couple problems with it. My home setup has a Mac Mini connected directly to a 42 inch Vizio LCD TV.

First, I love that Joost works so well with the Front Row remote control. Hitting MENU brings up the main Joost menu and the control buttons easily allow me to access all of the channels and the sub content of each channel. They have done such a great job with this that I wouldn't change a thing.

The picture quality on my tv is heavily compressed though. Some of the content is full screen and other is standard def and has black bars on the right and left. If they could increase the video quality I bet more people would be interested.

My main complaint happened today as my four year old daughter was watching original Saturday morning cartoons of Casper the Friendly Ghost. There are commercials that pop up at various times and the first one was for Kraft Easy Mac - this spot played about 3 times without showing any other spots. Then came a preview for Hostel 3 (or 2 - so hard to tell). The commercial is dark and scary and not at all suitable for a four year old. I'm pretty sure you'd never see an ad like that on Cartoon Network or Nick Jr. - They really need to work on placing ads based on their demo.

5 comments:

Matt Hendry said...

Contact Joost support

http://www.joost.com/support/contact.html

Unknown said...

Hi matt,

I was just wondering if you had any invites left? I want to give joost a try.

Jason

Nick Murto said...

I've got a couple - send me your email address and I'll send you an invite.

BTW - I had already attempted to contact Joost support. Still waiting for a response, and I'll post it here when I get it. Thx.

Nick

Nick Murto said...

We're coming up on 2 months since I made this original post and not a word back from Joost. WTF?! How hard is it to at least respond to a customer.

Oh well, I barely watch Joost that much anymore. Their content gets a a bit stale, and that once slick interface gets messy when there are a lot of shows to scroll though. Maybe they should show each series as it's own sub channel so you can choose MTV >> Punk'd >> episode name... just a thought.

Nick Murto said...

I finally heard back from Joost (wonder why it took so long?!)

Here's what they have to say:

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Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Joost™ and submitting your report.

We're very sorry if this happened, because it shouldn't.
We check the ads and add them ourselves to the content so it should never happen. Please let us know if this happens again so we can change the ad a.s.a.p.

Best regards,

Mark
The Joost Support Team