Five Fingers of Death

December 30 was proclaimed “Day of the Download” in Belgium. In fact, this was a protest action against the two main monopolistic Internet providers Telenet (TV-cable) and Belgacom (phone-cable). Unlike neighbouring countries, they both limit the download quantity to about 12 GByte per month.

My way of participating was to run internet TV Joost on two computers at the same time. And at night i looked at an old Kung-Fu movie (see the title of this post). After 20 minutes i realised that this was the same "first" Kung Fu movie i saw in my life more than 30 years ago. Great!

Result of my download contribution: 4 Gigabyte in 24 hours!

My evaluation of this daylong Joost experience, beginning with 5 good “fingers”:

1. It is free!
2. Diversity of channels (news, movies, documentaries, …)
3. Acceptable quality
4. Advertisements are short and not too frequent
5. Easy to pause – easy to start again

The 5 bad “fingers” … :

1. On one of my computers, frequent program crashes, on the other sometimes (but not too often) temporary frozen images and sounds.
2. The visual interface is a mess, difficult to make a fast choice
3. The sounds of the adds were often quite much louder than the sound of the movie or channel watched
4. High downloaded volume (a real obstacle if you have a limit!)
5. No remote control function!

Compared to Skype, Joost will IMHO not be a success story. It is nice, it is free, but it isn’t disruptive. The quality is acceptable, will probably improve, but it will probably always stay behind the quality of DVDs or paid television. If you can afford high resolution flat panel screens, you can afford to pay a subscription to high quality cable television!

Anyway, a happy New Year to all of you, Skype believers and unbelievers, Joost believers and unbelievers, and anybody else!