Not to worry. We’re happy to provide a sneak peak at yet another platform you can play our content on, and introduce our Joost Android client.
The app provides all the features you might know from the iPhone:
Browse by category, like anime, comedy, drama or sci-fi
Check out the “Popular” videos to see what people are watching
Find out what our team likes in “Joost Picks”
Or Search for a specific title or video name
Unfortunately we are still having some issues with video playback of some of our videos, and thus we’re not quite ready to put it on the Android Market yet. But in the meantime, if you are feeling adventurous or just cannot wait :), you can try it out by following the steps below.
On your phone, open the Settings.
Navigate to “Applications”.
Ensure that “Unknown sources” is checked. This will allow you to install apps from places other than the Market.
On your phone, open the browser.
Direct your phone’s browser to this blog post. The QR code below links directly here.
Then tap this link. It links directly to the app, and your phone will start downloading and installing it. You will be asked for confirmation first.
Back in the early days of Joost we had a downloadable client. Back in those “old” days we also used to have something called “widgets”. Times have changed, but widgets are still an interesting concept, thus we’ve been toying around with widgets in our Flash based player.
It’s a pretty basic example of a widget that uses the underlying video’s metadata to search on Twitter for things related to the video and display tweets on top of it.
Technically widgets are separate SWF files that are loaded by the Joost Player and displayed on top of the video. The Joost Player then exposes a simple API to the widgets:
video metadata: title, description, duration, etc
current time in the video, meaning that time based interaction is possible
ability to play/pause videos
That means that anything you can do in Flash, you can do in a widget plus you can access information about the underlying video.
We’ll be posting an alpha version of the “Widget API” soon, so this is just a teaser so far
We’re happy to announce yet another Joost Labs project today: a version of Joost customized for running on the Sony PlayStation 3.
It makes it a lot easier to play Joost content on a PlayStation 3 by presenting a simplified interface that allows you to navigate content using the controller. It does not have full EPG navigation, but you can browse our Joost Picks and popular content, and also search for shows. NB: Note that this is a Joost Labs project, so your mileage might vary We are, for example, aware of the playback occasionally not working.
To use it, go to the Network icon on your PlayStation, open the Internet Browser and press the Start button which will open the Address input field where you enter:
We’ve introduced a fresh new release of Jigsaw — Jigsaw 0.2. For you this means it’s slightly smarter, more social, and a bit prettier than before.
We’ve also introduced a toolbar making it easier for you to find all the possible actions. For example the “change direction” button helps you quickly switch upcoming music. A Twitter button allows you to tweet about your favorite songs directly.
There are clearly still a lot of opportunities left, so expect updates! If you want to make sure your favorite feature gets in the next release, be sure to let us know.
Following on from our recent Live Streaming of President Obama’s Inauguration, we’re pleased to start the return of regular Live broadcasting to Joost with euronews!
This is a labs project, so it is not yet integrated into the main site, (e.g. search, browsing, or adding to your queue) and unfortunately due to geographical content restrictions we are unable to broadcast euronews in: USA, Canada or Sweden.
We’re quite excited to present the first “Joost Labs” project: Project Jigsaw.
Project Jigsaw is a small project that experiments with how we present music videos, both visually and how the music line up is created. It allows you to play music using “artist name”, “tag name” or “last.fm profile name” to fill your queue with good music. You can also use the search box to search for more music and then drag’n'drop them to your queue, or re-arrange your queue by drag’n'dropping videos around.
Jigsaw Screenshot
We have over 10000 music videos on Joost, so Joost can be used as a pretty good jukebox. As we do not have all the music in the world on Joost though (naturally ), we use last.fm to look up related artists for the artist you’ve chosen and find music that is related in our content catalogue.
FAQ:
Why did we do this? Because we love music, and we like to experiment.
Where will this go from here? Who knows
Why is it missing feature X? Because it’s an experiment, it’s not meant to be perfect
Will it break tomorrow? Possibly (”get it while it’s hot” … and works! )
So go ahead and try it out. We look forward to hearing your feedback on it!
Joost Labs is born ! It’s still in a early stage as you can see, but this gets closer and closer to being active. We are still shaping a little bit our environment, so pardon the dust.
In the next couple of weeks we hope to make this place with some information, tips, insights and various experimental projects. This would enable us to be more collaborative and incorporate early feedback from you in order to shape some features or projects in a way that meet your needs and expectations.
If you like working with early projects despite some rough edges we are definitely looking forward to your feedback !
