JoostTeam

VS

Babelgum, the new Internet TV provider set to compete with Joost, just opened up to a wide beta. How does it stack up against the incumbent? Babelgum is bankrolled by Silvio Scaglia, champion of fiber-to-the-home in Italy. Meanwhile Joost is founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, of Skype and KaZaA fame. Both companies have people experienced with delivering a product with mass appeal.

Currently Babelgum lacks a Mac offering but it’s rumored that one will be delivered soon.

Content

Babelgum users are presented with 9 different channels, or groups, of content including News, Lifestyle, Music, Documentaries and Trends. Babelgum is actively looking for new partners and should have had a bit more of an offering before opening up their service. It’s said that Babelgum is looking for Long Tail viewers, but frankly I think that YouTube and other services may have that market cornered.

Joost apparently can’t go two weeks without announcing another high profile content partner. There certainly is a lot to look at. Babelgum aims to be as unintrusive as possible with tiny simplified controls. Babelgum lets you create custom “smart channels” using tags applied to the videos. The interface isn’t going to wow you, but it gets the job done.

Joost likes bright colors and a featureful interface that can sometimes be a bit overwhelming with everything on the screen. The search capability of Joost is quite prominent and makes it easy to find new content or save the search as a new channel in your “My Channels” view. It’s also a lot easier to move through the content in Joost at the expense of a cluttered screen. Once you get familiar with all the widgets and controls the Joost interface is smooth and polished with lots of little animated effects that enhance the TV watching experience.

Social Features and Extensibility

You’re not alone on the Internet but with Babelgum you feel that way. With Joost there’s the “My Joost” section that lets you chat with other people watching the same channel, instant message others, send a link to the show you’re watching, view ratings and blog about the show (with screenshots) all from within Joost. It’s not an open platform but they clearly understand the importance of a community.

Technical Features

Both Joost and Babelgum deliver pretty good video quality since they require a broadband connection. It may just be the generally higher production quality but videos on Joost tend to look better. Joost also requires a much beefier computer than Babelgum. Keeping Joost open in windowed (non-full screen) mode caused some stuttering with multiple applications open. Both applications are in beta so there’s still a lot of testing to be done but Babelgum was rock solid throughout. Many internet service providers aren’t too thrilled about streaming video so be advised.

Overall

If either content or communication is king then Joost has Babelgum beat for now. Babelgum is still a good product but it needs to become remarkably more social or add some “must have” content quickly. Even so these two services are getting a lot of attention and competition is good so give them both a try.

[Summary of whirn.com]