P2P video service Joost quietly slipped its 1.0 beta for Mac and Windows out the door late last week, and we were curious as to why there was no fanfare for the (almost) 1.0 release. It turns out that the team was holding off on the celebrations for today, as it has announced via the Joost blog that Joost is now open to the public. No longer will curious testers be forced to beg their friends for Joost invites (does this mean I will stop getting a steady stream of e-mails requesting invites too?) as anyone who wants to watch the streaming video channels can now do so at their leisure.

Joost sprang forth from the minds of Skype's Janus Friis and Kazaa's Niklas Zennström last year, dubbed originally as The Venice Project. The service was launched with the goal of offering ad-supported television content over the Internet, but through a distributed streaming model like that of BitTorrent—instead of pulling video content from a central server, it would instead stream it from multiple users around the 'Net. The P2P service opened up to its first small group of beta testers in December and was renamed to Joost this January.

Since then, Joost has been slowly ramping up. Media giant Viacom signed a deal with Joost in February that would allow the service to broadcast shows from MTV, BET, Comedy Central, and even a few movies from Paramount. The move came just after Viacom walked away from talks with YouTube and just before it filed its $1 billion lawsuit against the site for "brazen" copyright infringement. CBS was next to hop on board with Joost with a few of its shows; CNN joined the party in May with content from Larry King Live and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Major League Baseball also inked a deal with Joost just last week, allowing the video service to stream the upcoming MLB playoffs within 24 hours of initial airing.

While many of those shows are popular with viewers, Joost is still extremely limited in its content selection—most users cannot survive on Larry King and Adult Swim alone. The video service may be free, but the lack of fresh content is still driving many TV aficionados to paid services like the iTunes Store to get a much wider selection of shows or the world of BitTorrent for an even wider selection sans cost.

There's also still the dilemma of getting that content onto the actual television set. A recent survey by Accenture showed that the majority of Internet users would rather watch video downloads on the TV instead of on their monitors, which is something that Apple, Microsoft, and even Amazon are attempting to do with the Apple TV, Xbox 360, and TiVo, respectively. Joost has yet to find an official hardware partner, however, which means that users who want to watch Joost programming on the TV will need to use an HTPC. That's a fine solution for the tech-savvy audience, but it has a very limited reach when it comes to the general population.

Joost's public debut is sure to net a number of new users who were unable to score invites during the service's private beta period. But until Joost manages to sign on more content partners and figures out a way to make its way to the TV screen, it will find itself fighting an uphill battle against competing video services.