Joost's Live Test: No Antenna? No Coax? No Fiber? No Problem

Last August, I told you that I experienced a rare, precious ‘the world is never going to be the same again’ revelation while testing T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home merged cellular-plus-VoIP service. I had another of those a-ha moments yesterday afternoon, while watching the NCAA playoffs live (emphasis is intentional) on the 28" widescreen LCD in my bedroom.

Live? "But Brian," you might be thinking right about now, "I thought you said you didn’t have television service at your remote residence?" Did I break down and stick an antenna on top of a tall pole, foolishly thumbing my nose at the ~100 MPH wind gusts that sometimes scream over the ridge my home’s located atop? Did I break down and get a cable or satellite TV subscription? Or did AT&T extend its U-Verse service ‘up the hill’ from Sacramento?

The answer’s "no" to all of the above. I fired up Joost. The service is currently running a live test in combination with its investment partner, CBS, and through it I was able to watch both of yesterday’s games, Memphis-vs-Texas and Davidson-vs-Kansas (I was pleasantly surprised to find myself able to snag screen captures of the DirectX-accelerated video window, using only the humble Windows Print Screen key method!):

The image quality wasn’t stunning, for either the ’standard’ or ‘high quality’ streams, but it was quite acceptable. Frequently, I found myself forgetting that I wasn’t watching a NTSC broadcast. Joost even rebroadcast the CBS-sourced commercials (and yes, I was highly amused to be watching a Comcast cable television service promotion over Joost!):

Joost was very upfront about the fact that viewers shouldn’t expect a glitch-free experience:

This is a test of our live P2P streaming service, and we expect (and kind of hope) that some things will go wrong so we can fix them and offer a stable live service in the future.

What to Expect During the LIVE Test

If the stream stops while you are watching a game, try re-starting the game you are watching. Generally, the stream should start right back up again. If that doesn’t work, you might want to exit Joost and then start it up again.

Here’s more (in bright red type, even!):

WARNING:

This is a test of our live P2P streaming service. It’s a pretty complex technology, and we fully expect things to go wrong. The stream may stutter, slow, or stop altogether. If your stream does stop, we recommend restarting the channel - that usually works. Otherwise, you might have to re-start Joost. We apologize for any inconveniences, but your participation will help us build a stable live service!

So what glitches did I encounter, and how did I solve them? First and foremost, understand that I was ‘tuning’ into Joost using my relatively modest Dell Inspiron 700m laptop, wirelessly tethered to my 2.5 Mbps DSL-fed router over 802.11g. Initially, I booted up the v0.10.2 Joost client from last May, and was greeted by a frozen screen. CTRL-ALT-DEL got me to Task Manager, from which I was able to terminate Joost, and my first step in debugging the problem was to install the latest v1.1.4 beta client. I launched it and again got a frozen display, although the corresponding audio kept smoothly playing over my speakers.

Continue reading with ‘Joost’s Live Test: Hiccups and Workarounds‘….