They've been sending out invites from last week, also adverts have been available in the UK since yesterday. T-Mobile and Shampoo companies seemed to be the choice when I was accessing. Their program range is still fairly limited in the Uk, potentially a lot of the deals are focused in the US.

No content worth watching, and it's yet another peer to peer app that disguises what it's doing to your bandwidth.

Wake me up when they have some decent content.

around the middle of April i got an invitation from them to join their trials and use their new tv-via-p2p internet tv channels.

I go to their site, at https://www.joost.com/download/ to download the installler... and what do i get ? a slap-in-the face license.

I took the time to actually read the license they display (i know...wow factor) and what i read in that license gave me the willies..

They display it in a tiny window... i had to select it all, copy into clipboard and paste it into another program to view it properly.

Practically it says they can install and any software they want without asking me, provided that the software they install claims to display a license and that license is accepted.

Here are the relevant quotes:

2.1.1 Joost and the Joost™ Software will, and will permit third parties to, display advertising and other information within the interface of the Joost™ Software and/or in connection with the display of content and programming, in all cases without compensation to you. Joost or the Joost™ Software serves, and permits third parties to serve, advertisements within or adjacent to the content and programming delivered to you by the Joost™ Software. You understand and agree that Joost or the Joost™ Software, or applicable third parties, may include content-targeted advertisements or other related information, as further described in the Joost Privacy Policy. Your correspondence or business dealings with, or participation in promotions of, advertisers found on or through the Joost™ Software, including payment and delivery of related goods or services, and any other terms, conditions, warranties or representations associated with such dealings, are solely between you and such advertiser.

all clean, right ?? WRONG. here's what comes next a bit further:

4.1. You hereby acknowledge and agree that the Joost™ Software may be incorporated into, and may incorporate itself, software and other technology owned and controlled by third parties. Any such third party software or technology that is incorporated in the Joost™ Software falls under the scope of this Agreement. Any and all other third party software or technology that may be distributed together with the Joost™ Software will be subject to you explicitly accepting a license agreement with that third party. You acknowledge and agree that you will not enter into a contractual relationship with Joost or its affiliates regarding such third party software or technology and you will look solely to the applicable third party and not to Joost or its affiliates to enforce any of your rights.

.....snip...

4.2.3. When installed on your computer, the Joost™ Software may periodically communicate with Joost servers and/or Joost™ Software installed by other users. Additionally, third party software installed on Your computer may periodically communicate with third party servers for the purposes described in the license agreement or privacy policy between you and that third party.

what ?! third party software may communicate with third party servers ??? isn't this the core definition of spyware ??

12.8. Governing Law; Jurisdiction; Waiver of Claims. This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Luxembourg, without regard to conflict of law rules thereof. The parties hereto expressly understand and agree that any action brought by you against Joost arising out of this Agreement shall be brought exclusively in the courts located in Luxembourg, and any action brought by Joost against you arising out of this Agreement shall, at the election of Joost, be brought in either the courts located in Luxembourg, or the applicable courts of the jurisdiction in which you reside. The parties hereby consent to, and irrevocably submit themselves to, the exclusive personal jurisdiction and venue of such courts as set forth in this section. You further agree not to bring claims on a representative, class member basis, or as a private attorney general, and agree not to assert any claims against Joost unless such claims are asserted by you in the forum required by this Agreement no later than one year following the date that your claim or cause of action arose.

HUH ?? any lawyer around that actually has a license to practice in Luxemburg ?? not many i think, thus lawsuits there are VERY expensive.

and double HUH ... no class action lawsuits are allowed? are they nuts ?

Also..what forum ?? there's no address mentioned in the license agreement itself, maybe the one on their website.

Practically what they say is that they could install any software that claims to show a license to the user and would not install if the user says no... now where did i hear that ?? right... a ton of junk 'helpers' out there claim to behave like this but in reality they dont.

And then Joost says it's not their fault if the software they installed turns to be...let's suppose..a keylogger... and this is where the next bit comes into play: the joost installer itself is trying to do something nasty: What the hell is the joost installer trying to do with my yahoo messenger ?? zone alarm warned me immediately that joost is trying to inject something into the ym process (and i have a screenshot of it too).

yuck.. i clicked cancel install and delete.

this software is thrown in the bit bucket.

Also, there's no way you can register on their PUBLIC support forum from the web and start asking questions. They DO NOT allow asking questions prior to installing the app and agreeing to the slavery 'license' agreement.

The only way you can register to get access and post questions on their PUBLIC support forum is by installing their application.

The only way to install their application is by clicking "OK" to that stupid license-to-install-spyware agreement.

Do you see a pattern here ?? they locked out the critics of their app, and only allow inside the slaves that already agreed to be whipped and not fight back.

bleh.

Have had adverts on this for months; agree with Andrew, no content worth watching and Ady the reason they ask you to agree to all that is they can no longer read your mind since you started wearing the tin foil hat

'No content worth watching, and it's yet another peer to peer app that disguises what it's doing to your bandwidth.'

Cant comment on the content but a little program called Netlimiter gives you all the control you want over up and downstream for most apps.

At home on my 8mbit connection it will work most of the time, but here at uni I have no chance. There is a http proxy in place and Joost can't yet go around it - Skype works fine though....

Just for those who don't know what the word "Forum" means in the Joost license (see "joost = license to install spyware inside"); this is simply the legal term designating any legal court under the Luxemburg jurisdiction:

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/forum

One thing perhaps not yet sufficiently clear from the legalese docs is that Joost has an extensions system ("Widgets") that allows viewers to choose - consciously and carefully whether to install little bundles of functionality created by others. They show up in the "My Joost" area alongside the existing clock, chat, news ticker, tools,etc and are built from standard Web technologies such as XML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, Javascript... So a big design choice here was sandboxing:

- should Joost allow these widgets to know anything about what's currently being watched?

- should Joost allow these widgets ways of talking to the outside world?

Given a tentative "yes" on both of these, it is of course important that users understand that they're installing a limited form of 3rd party software and potentially accessing external data services, who will have their own privacy policies. An alternative would be to limit the Widget system so that only Joost-authored widgets were possible, or that they can only access Joost Web services. The current design puts some responsibility in the hands of the Widget-installing viewer, with the hope of creating a rich ecology of Joost Widgets and associated sites. But we're very open to feedback on the best tradeoffs to make here.

I'm posting this from my gmail account, ... but if folk have further thoughts on this, especially on the tradeoffs around 3rd party widgets, drop me a note using danbri-at-joost.com.