Joost is pronounced "juiced"

How Joost IPTV Network Will Run
By Kyle Monson

Our fledgling blog, AppScout, got the CEO of fledgling video service Joost, Fredrik de Wahl, on the phone Wednesday. We had a good chat about Joost's delivery system, video quality, and why you won't be able to upload your grainy webcam video of your dorm room to Joost's pristine video service. If you recall, Joost was until yesterday known as the Venice Project, and is geared toward bringing the TV experience to a Web-based platform. Let's jump right into it...
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AppScout: To start off, how do you move the video around? Do you have a CDN, or is it straight peer to peer?

Fredrik de Wahl: We have a hybrid peer-to-peer approach. P2P delivery is great for very popular content--for things that are really challenging when you want to have mass distribution. For less popular content, P2P does not provide the best technical solution.

In these circumstances, a centralized distribution mechanism actually has very few problems and provides the best solution for the end user. So what we have done is taken an approach to this where we have a "long-tail storage system" which is acting as a seeding server for the network. The LTS is the originating point in the system and also the fallback in case for some reason the content does not reside on the P2P network. There's absolutely no way [for the user] to determine how and where the user gets the content from and that's the reason we designed Joost like that--the viewing experience is all about getting the content in full-screen, high-resolution, and the technology is acting in the background. The viewer of Joost just gets an extraordinary viewing experience from the technology.

If it's P2P, where does the content actually live on a user's machine?

It's not only a P2P network, it's P2P streaming. Everything is delivered to the end user or the viewer in bits and bytes which are a proprietary standard, and each packet is encrypted. Different packets are then cached after being viewed on your machine much like cached Web content from your Web browser, with the difference being that we then pass it on to others when they want to watch it.

Everything originates from the long-tail storage server in Luxembourg, and then if the content is also available in caches, the caches will start to chip in. When there's enough content in the different caches, you can stream everything just from the peers.

Are these Long-Tail Stations like Skype's "supernode" architecture? Does Joost own them or are they users? More...