Unless you’ve been living in a box you’ve probably heard about Joost. It’s coming.

What is Joost?

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

It’s like tv and the net all mashed together. Not only can you watch tv, but it comes with the benefits of the net built in. Things like search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program – so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. The coolest feature is that you don’t have to wait to watch what you want. Unlike you’re easy to use cable tv box with DVR, you don’t have to wait until a program is scheduled to play to watch it.

The inteface looks slick (as it should), they have screenshots of the display over on their site aso you can check them out. Joost is not yet open to the public, but they have a widespread beta going on. You can request signup for the beta here or ask someone who is already a beta use to send you an invitation (if you have one send it to me!).

This isn’t just another web 2.0 experiment. The guys who created this also made two programs that shook up their respective industries…. Kazaa changed P2P and made it widespread and usable (tho I never really liked it) and Skype which really brought free voice over IP outta the realm of geek toys into the hands of everybody.

Joost will be advertising supported. I wonder if that means no skipping over commercials? If it does, then I fear it will be of limited use to me. If they just display ads on the side, or perhaps a 30 second clip at the beginning than I don’t see how this can fail.