VoIP Now: Joost Bandwidth Issues?

February 01, 2007

Joost Bandwidth Issues?

Hmm. Very interesting. Never thought about it until I read about how much bandwidth Joost IPTV might be consuming. It does make sense, consider how high quality the video content I've seen on Joost has been. Quality frames take space and thus increase bandwidth.

This is kind of scary, considering that my cable Internet plan only allows 6 Gb per month, if I'm not mistaken. For someone who tests a lot of software, it's not much, but there are no options for home-based service for me. If I exceed the limit, I get a warning, then I get cut off. Which is disastrous for me, who works all day online.

It'll teach me to read the fine print more carefully on the next application I test. But it does make me wonder how successful Joost is going to be if you can use up 1 Gb in 10 hrs. While it's unlikely I'd watch that enough Joost yet (because of lack of content I'm immediately interested in) to make it an issue, the issue is still there for the future.

I'm not sure that average future Joost user is going to want to be a node in a torrent-style network, and hence bandwidth is a real problem. From a very technical point of view, they could consider using fractal image compression or even wavelets, but those are quite advanced methods that don't necessarily lend themselves to video (fractal compression is a lossy method). Ultimately, it seems to me that Joost is ahead of its time, like Skype was, and that for true enjoyment of IPTV on the larger flat panel TV screens that are coming out, viewers are going to need quad processor computers with souped up graphics processors and Gigabit access speeds.

--
Did you enjoy this post?

February 1, 2007 in Networks, Services, Software | Permalink