Downloaded Joost. Not bad, suffers the same flaw as iTunes (wasting CPU to draw a pretty interface) but not nearly as pronounced. Also has the same flaw that all TV alternatives have: there is not enough content. Granted, there’s a lot, but most of that is CSI and Aqua Teen hunger Force. If I wanted to only watch a few shows, I hop on iTunes and buy them. (Because I’d never use bit torrent to download content illegally, of course.)

Deleted Joost. Enjoyed the hell out of some cartoons and Premium Blend episodes, but this is basically a less-efficient alternative to YouTube, with better image quality.

This is what I’d like to see. Don’t know how feasible it is, but then again I’m not going to keel over and die for lack of it. Anyhow, my idea is this: every day at midnight eastern (all TV is on eastern time anyway), each network puts their entire lineup for the day on this service, which I will call “the service” because I just can’t bring myself to give a damn. Now what you’d do is fire it up and load a channel, let’s say Discovery Channel, and it plays what’s on Discovery right then and there, same as if you’d tuned your TV in to it. If you don’t want to watch Dirty Jobs or whatever, you can bring up a list and see what else is on the list for the day, and watch what the hell you please. In other words, the way Comcast On Demand should work. Add in a Tivo-like function since everyone and their dog would demand it anyhow. But most importantly, it should be centralized. You should never have to close out the service and fire up a different one because you wanted to change channels.

Incidentally, as much as I dislike ads all over everything, I think this hypothetical service would do well with the ad model Joost uses. An ad plays at the commercial breaks and between shows. Not a whole commercial block, an ad. I’m not thinking along the lines of what’s feasible or fiscally viable, just what I’d like to see. Though I have a suggestion for both the hypothetical service and Joost: at least attempt to normalize the ads’ volume with the show content.