Joost

Ad-supported on-demand interactive television. Joost is television-quality full-screen programming with hundreds of shows to choose from. Watch the shows when you want and as many times as you want. I've been using Joost for a few days now and it is as good as it sounds, but there is a couple of things you'll need to know and have.

• You'll need a computer.
  
  I'd recommend any Intel-based Macintosh computer running OSX 10.4 or later, but if like me, you don't yet own a Mac, you can also run it on a 1GHz Pentium4 and 512Mb RAM running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c
  
  
• You'll need a broadband Internet connection.
  
  The site recommends a 1Mb connection and warns those with an upper limit on their Internet download or those that are on a pay-per-megabyte plan that watching Joost for an hour will consume about 320Mb of your download limit. So if you are on a plan like the one that Activ8 me are offering to rural Australians, don't go near this or you will be literally paying thousands.
  
  
• You'll need an invitation
  
  Like Gmail, Joost is invite only. You can get an invite to Joost by filling out the "Please Invite Me" form on their site. I've noticed that filling this form out doesn't instantly get you an invite. For some people, they had to wait a day for it to turn up in their inbox.

Joost is beta software but it runs well on my systems. All the shows I've watched have only had a single sponsor so there was only ever one single ad in the ad breaks. I think last time I actually counted the ad in an ad break on normal free-to-air television I got up to about seven ad in a single break!

Browsing the channels is a straight forward affair and I found it easy to find something to watch. Once you have chosen a channel, you can then browse all the shows on that channel and watch the one that you want immediately.

Joost also features several widgets that can choose from be displayed on the screen while you are watching a video. This allows you to have instant message windows, a clock or a news ticker. They plan to release more widgets as they're developed.

I seem to have stopped watching normal television. I'm tired of endless advertising and reality television. Give me a good movie or even a documentary any day.