Introducing Joost Links
Joost provides thousands of hours of video content that can be streamed on demand to Joost viewers all around the world. But how can you find your way through this huge collection? Enter Joost Links. Each piece of content on Joost has an associated Web page, allowing viewers to link, blog, tag or cross-reference these pages so that the collective power of the Joost community can be harnessed for everyone's benefit.
Joost Links are our basic building block for linking the social side of Joost with the social side of the Web: making things linkable, sharable and clickable, so that the things you find in Joost can be found by your friends in the Web.
Joost, meet the Web
Joost Links are the crossover point between the Web environment and the desktop Joost experience. When you visit the Joost Link web page for a video, and if you have Joost installed, it will give you the chance to view that video in Joost (by clicking on a special link). When you are watching something in Joost, the "info" window gives you a quick button for copying the address of the Joost Link into your computer's copy/paste clipboard. This makes it easy to share the link using email, chat, blogs or social bookmarking systems.
These Joost Links can provide a foundation for interesting applications. Joost developers as well as members of the Joost community are starting to experiment with ways of sharing and grouping videos facilitated by Joost Links. To pick one example: Joost Links when used in Atom/RSS newsfeeds offer a way of syndicating descriptions of Joost content in the Web - and when viewed with Joost's built-in Newsticker widget, any Joost Links in a feed will automatically play the corresponding video in Joost.
At the moment, there are only two basic kinds of Joost Link: a link for a channel, or a link for a video. Either kind can activate the Joost application directly, or be dragged into the Joost window to play. Beyond this, we are planning some interesting things such as exposing some of the channel guide functionality, so that simple Joost "channels" can be shared through the Web; and sharing some detail from our metadata server, to help you build your own Web-based interfaces to Joost. We are also exploring the possibility of mechanisms for providing Joost Links that correspond to more complex things than "play a video". For example, you might want to send a link to your friends which linked a particular chat channel name with a video, so you could talk with them in that chat while wtching the video together.
Technical details
What do Joost Links look like?
Joost links are just URLs of a certain form, comprising the joost.com domain name coupled with a seven character alpha-numeric unique identifier (three numbers then four letters or numbers).
is a link for a single video. There are also links for channels; for example, here is Aardman Animation's channel. At the moment, there is no syntactic distinction between these two. In the future, we may introduce conventions that allow these and other classes of Joost Link to be distinguished without additional metadata.
Permanency and uniqueness
Joost Links will never be reused and will always uniquely identify a video or channel, however, from time to time videos and channels may be removed from Joost, in which case the metadata about the video or channel is removed too, resulting in a 404 for that page.
Metadata and geographical restrictions
Some Joost content is restricted to certain countries, however anyone can see the web page associated with a video or channel even if the video is restricted for them. The web page explains the restrictions if there are any. If you try to play a video or channel that is restricted in your area, the Joost player will not play it.
Web page plugins to play Joost Links
When Joost is installed, it also installs a browser plugin, which we use in Joost Link pages to detect
whether or not Joost is installed. In addition we install a joost: protocol handler just like
mailto: or callto: so that we can launch Joost from a link such as
<a href='joost://1234567'>launch joost</a> or by simple writing joost://1234567
in the browser address field, or other contexts such as in software programs like Skype, in the windows Run dialog, etc.
For general Web usage, the Joost Link form of identifier is preferred. It is best to link to the Joost Link page, to support people without the software installed.
Joost Links and widgets
The Joost Widget APIs offer Joost Link-related functions in a few places; see (forthcoming) documentation for details. We expect that Joost Links will prove to be one of the core elements that bind together the various socially oriented Widgets that we and others are developing, for example, linking user annotations, tags or recommendations.
Forthcoming interfaces
We do not currently offer any Web service interfaces that provide metadata about Joost Links, but this is an area we are planning work in. If you have ideas and suggestions, get in touch via the forums.
TV Anywhere, anytime
