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The people behind Skype are launching a new which promises broadcast quality telly over the net. Well that's the headline, and I'm sure a lot of you will be scratching your heads thinking, "Can't I get that anyway?" and "Why bother?", and in that vein there's some pretty sharp analysis from someone who got their hands on a Joost (for so it is called) player early :

Before having tested the player I feared that Niclas, Janus and Dirk might be going wrong this time in that the disruption comes in democratizing the content, not the platform. My argument was that it seemed that they were betting on their business acumen to close deals with the content providers rather than disrupting the actual distribution...I've pulled back on that conclusion as the genuine disruption lies not in the distribution, but on what comes on top of the TV viewing

And that for the author is the ability to build applications that will work with the video player. For example, Last.fm style applications that will deliver the content you want based on your preferences and the prefrences of people like you.

The arrival of yet another player is grist to the mill for bloggers like Jeff Jarvis who argue for the breaking of traditional broadcast models where content creators also own the means of distribution (i.e. the transmitters). Put the stuff out there, is the message, and let people consume it as they will. Underlining this point Jeff and others point to this story about a small town US TV station . They've a lot to gain and very little (ad revenue) to lose from this approach.

But returning to Joost, it has one other advantage over traditional server based solutions. It's peer-to-peer meaning it doesn't rely on big central servers to distribute content, and that makes it cheap to run - in essence it exploits the spare bandwidth of individual web users. Bandwidth isn't an insignificant issue when it comes to TV quality video. Whereas for non peer-to-peer systems each additional viewer brings added costs for peer-to-peer services they're much, much smaller. And that means fewer advertisements and a better experience for viewers. It's a model broadcasters who generate no marginal revenue from additional viewers might ponder.