I first heard about Joost a few months ago while I was still in South Africa. I quickly headed over to the site, signed up for a beta invitation, and began excitedly waiting for it to arrive in my inbox. Of course early adopter Scott beat me to the punch and received his invitation way before I did. However being the nice ginger that he is, as soon as he received invitations to pass on to his friends, he whipped one out to me.

So about 3 weeks ago I signed up and started playing. Given that I was in Cape Town at the time (and thanks to Telkom, South Africa’s bandwidth generally sucks), my use of it was hampered as the videos took ages to download and the viewing experience was by no means pleasant. Nevertheless it seemed like a pretty cool concept.

On Tuesday I received an email from Joost announcing their latest 0.9 release and now that I’m in London I thought I’d hop on in and check it out again. To say I was blown away would be a vast understatement. Joost is incredible and truly takes IPTV to a place it has never even been close to in the past.

It runs on a bespoke but very web integrated desktop client. The interface is awesome, easy to use, extremely subtle and uncluttered. With a 16MB ADSL pipe, the videos played without buffering and although the content availability is still pretty limited, the experience was awesome. I found myself jumping up and down like an excited school girl as I considered where this could take things.

Joost is the brainchild of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the guys who thought up both Kazaa and Skype (talk about über gurus!!!). Wired published a fantastic article about them and Joost here and I highly recommend giving it a read. Joost has the potential to turn TV on its head. I can honestly say if it had all the content I want (i.e. cricket coverage, which it will eventually have I’m sure), I would happily throw out the old TV and Sky box.

I still have a couple of invitations so if you want to try it out, drop me a line or leave a note in the comments and I’ll gladly share them with you.