Web Dillies

Thanks to Georg who provided me an invitation, i was able to digg a bit into Joost. At the core, Joost is very similar to Babelgum. It provides some additional Features like a widget gallery where - as far as i’ve seen - you can provide your own widgets and there is also a chat application integrated so can chat with your friends right out of the Joost client. They’ve organized their Content into several Genres. At the time of writing, they have the following:

• Cartoons & Animation
• Comedy
• Documentary
• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Music
• Music Entertainment
• Sports & Games

The performance of Joost seems to be slightly better than Babelgum but that might be affected by the network performance on my site that varies over daytime. Another thing that does not vary over daytime is the user interface. My favorite is definitely the Babelgum UI. It’s more intuitive, much nicer than the Joost UI and more fun to use.

From a content perspective, the point goes to Babelgum but this is a personal choice so everyone has to decide that for themselves.

The biggest disadvantage of Joost - at least in my environment - is the need to shoot some holes into the firewall just to get Joost running. For a fun product like Internet TV, this is a No-Go for me.

These days, i checked out Babelgum, a free on-demand TV which is currently in Beta. As soon as you’ve installed the Babelgum client, you can instantly begin to watch fullscreen TV. I’ve tried it out on the second screen (1280×1024) of my Notebook and it looks pretty good. The client application has a nice design and is easy to use. I found plenty of content across a variety of topics. To get their users started, they’ve organised content into nine thematic channels:

What i found remarkable is that there are a lot of contributions with a length between 10 to 25 minutes. Very well for a quick relaxing break during a hard day.