Microsoft Unveils “Joost Killer”
Longtime readers know I don’t give a shit about top-down Hollywood-suckup video startups like Joost, trying to push your old man’s TV down your shiny new pipes. Readers at Emerging Earth know I hate Microsoft. That’s why I was laughing my ass off when I heard that Microsoft announced a “Joost killer“.
Using LiveStation, PC users can watch live, uninterrupted television from the comfort of their computer chairs. Co-developed with a London-based company known as Skinkers, the Microsoft Research team has created a way to stream live television over a peer-to-peer network and use Silverlight to display multimedia content on the client’s system.
They tried to kill YouTube with Soapbox and failed. Now, instead of rallying community support for their pathetic “Flash killer” Silverlight, they’re trying to get Hollywood support. Community adoption is what pushed Flash to the fore, and Adobe knows it. Clearly, Microsoft hasn’t figured that out yet.
It’s a dinosaur using a dinosaur to beat another dinosaur to hatch its dinosaur egg. We mammals can only laugh at the carnage. Hell, with Microsoft’s love of spyware, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were another MPAA trap.
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POSTED IN: Microsoft
2 opinions for Microsoft Unveils “Joost Killer”
Jari
Jul 6, 2007 at 6:19 am
Mike,
I’m sorry you have such negative comments. I wanted to clear up some points to make sure your readers understand where we’re coming from:
1. While Microsoft has a minority stake in Skinkers (the company developing LiveStation), this project is very much our own initiative. We are developing the platform on technology originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge but now it’s fair to say that we are going forward with our own engineers (with the occasional phone-call to the MS researchers for hard-to-find answers!.
2. Unlike what some people are saying, we are definitely NOT TAKING ON Joost! We love Joost and think it’s a great idea, but we are trying to do something different and complementary: we are trying to get live television on the computer. We believe that the user experience with streaming so far has never been really good enough. We hope to move the user experience a step forward and maybe to the point where people will look at LiveStation and think “Wow, I can ACTUALLY watch this and keep it on my computer”.
Please don’t go around saying “Microsoft is taking on Joost”. The correct slogan should be “Skinkers is trying to get TV working on the computer!”.
and why live TV? Because some things are best consumed fresh. I like my coffee fresh, I like my news, sports and other events live. I have England beating Australia in the Rugby World on DVD and haven’t watched it once… watching it live was the value to me.
All the best.
LiveStation Team
Mike Abundo
Jul 6, 2007 at 6:29 am
Thanks for your comment, Jari. You are wise to try and distance yourself from Microsoft.
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