Several years ago, my wife and I made the decision that we weren't going to pay for TV. To be quite honest, we couldn't get cable or satellite where we lived so it was a forced decision. With the exception of a one year subscription to a satellite dish company, we haven't paid for television since.

Where we currently live we could have any number of "pay" television services, but we choose not to subscribe.  We have even gone as far as not to have an antenna, because we want to feel better about ourselves and say we don't watch TV.  We do subscribe to high speed internet though, which we could not live without.

To be honest, we do watch quite a few TV shows, just not on the television. We will watch a TV show through a network website (I am addicted to Survivor), rent a DVD on Netflix, subscribe to a video podcast, or use YouTube.

So imagine my excitement when I acquired an invite to Joost.

Joost was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (the creators of Skype, which is now owned by Ebay).  Joost's site says that it's "powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators". It's a cool new way to watch TV, but over the internet!

The Interface is really slick, and the video quality is great! Mind you, Joost is not like the YouTube player where the videos are downloaded to your computer in the background, and then play from your hard disk. Joost actually streams the content to you over a Peer to Peer network.  And just like "normal" TV, it has advertising but these ads are infrequent.  

What can you watch on Joost? This is a challenging question to answer: it depends on where you are located.  Joost seems to be geographically sensitive.  Many users are reporting different sets of channels.  

Pixelspread published an exhaustive list of all reported channels, if you're interested. I have installed Joost on two separate computers in my home, and I can report that I am missing some channels on my laptop that I have on my desktop machine.