| Article Index |
|---|
| Joost - the better way to watch TV |
| Facts |
| Screenshots |
| Ports you need to know |
| Be part of Joost |
| All Pages |
I got invited to the beta program of Joost (pronounced 'juiced') recently.
So what you should know about it, you ask?
Well, maybe this short official Joost video gives some answers:
Curious about Joost now? What about some facts?
Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.
- created by Niklas Zennström
and Janus Friis
(founders of Skype
and Kazaa
) - based on XULRunner
and the audio management re-uses the ZAP Media Kit 
- video playback utilizes the CoreCodec, CoreAVC
H.264
video decoder - really nice gui
- video on demand, totally free
- no need to watch a stream from the beginning to the end, e.g. fast forward to a specific time
- playback starts at the position where you left Joost on start-up
- constantly growing video archive
- divisions of Viacom (including MTV Networks
, BET Networks
and Paramount Pictures
) will license their "television and theatrical programing" to Joost - also licensing agreements in place with Ministry of Sound TV
, Warner Music
, the production company Endemol
, Diversion Media
, CBS
, CenterStaging's rehearsals.com 
- for the sport fans: Joost signed a deal to distribute NHL
content, including full game replays of the Stanley Cup
Finals, and vintage games - for a beta it's working quite nice, incredibly nice imho
- several community features, like a built-in jabber client, chat, rating of clips you see
- public version will be able to be extended by user-written extensions
Opening ports required by Joost
If you know that your ISP allows you to use UDP but still can't see any video, you'll need to check that your firewall or router is configured to allow access by Joost application. In particular, make sure that the following are enabled:
- TCP access, outbound, to ports 80, 443 and 5223.
- UDP access, outbound, to port 33333.
- If you have a public IP address and UDP inbound on port 33333 is unfiltered, the
client may use UDP on port 33333 inbound. - If you want to chat from within Joost, you'll also need to enable inbound TCP
access to port 5223.
Check also that your network has DNS servers configured - Joost client makes regular DNS requests like any other application.
So what should you do to get invited? For the german users out there: take a look at tv-joost.net
, people are really nice there - it's a nice community.
For the non-germans: sorry, I don't really know. If you want to be invited by myself, please leave a comment on the last page of this article including a short reason and your mail adress. However, if there are too much requests, I don't know if 'll answer all.
Some further links:
- Five Questions with Skype co-founder Janus Friis

- Skype Founders' Venice Project Revealed

- JoostList Unofficial Video Channel Guide

- Joost up your Internet!

- 7 Reasons why Joost could fail
and one reason why it probably won't







