Seven Generational Ruminations

It's tricky reviewing a service I haven't used, but this article at The Register does examine this new service well enough to give me an idea of what it's about. Joost is a new service for delivering video over the Internet in a way different than has been tried in the past.

Almost exactly ten years ago I began a job at VXtreme, one of the early pioneers in sending video over the Internet. In the summer of 1997 Microsoft bought VXtreme and turned their product into Windows Media Player. This and the other existing video delivery methods like Real, and Quicktime, and the Flash video services like YouTube, all represent an old model of delivering video. It involves a central server or server farm that holds the video as data files. With the right client software someone running a web browser can access that video content and play it on their computer. The client software makes a TCP/IP connection to that server farm and streams the video over the Internet from the central server farm. Hence this causes a lot of Internet traffic to these central server farms, and to host a massive online video event requires an excessive amount of bandwidth connecting to that server farm.