I’ve been playing around with the beta version of Joost for the past few weeks. If you haven’t heard already, Joost is a “new way of watching TV on the internet.” You can choose from over a dozen channels and pretty much watch TV completely free from your computer. It’s definately a cool concept, and there’s no surprise that Joost has been receiving plenty of hype from the media and Internets. But there’s only one problem: Joost sucks.

The biggest flaw with Joost is the content. Honestly, who wants to watch National Geographics and GameStar TV. And if you like sports, you’re stuck with Indy racing, soccer, and some crappy extreme sports channel. They’ve also thrown in big names like MTV and Comedy Central for good measure, but you only get the reject programs like Laguna Beach (wtf?) and Stella.

There are also problems with the actual software. I’m currently running on a 6 month old Macbook with plenty of RAM. When I fire up Joost, I feel like my laptop is about to explode. So don’t even think about running any other application if you have Joost open. Although I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Joost, I’m still experiencing random delays and crashes. Not good at all.

But enough bitching and moaning from me. Joost is currently invite-only, and I’ve got a few invites left. If you want to see what the hype is all about, leave a comment and I’ll send out invites on a first come first serve basis.

Update: You can manually invite yourself to the Joost beta here. Joost also came out with a new software upgrade today, which crashes your computer even more. Folks, it still sucks. If you want a real Internet TV solution, get yourself a Slingbox. I’ve had mine for over a week and it seriously kicks ass.