Joost, the future of television (or not), was hands-on critiqued by Chris Lynch. And I paid even more attention when he ended a paragraph with

[…] from an entertainment and television platform perspective, it’s no more interesting than watching TV shows on my iPod. Sure, I do it, but I only do it when I don’t have any other choice.

He had expressed the widely-blogged/widely-held story of

The quality is poor, the content is rather bland right now, and shows didn’t really hold my interest very long.

But it was the expression of want:need that made me think of the reasons why people buy into, and build, content experiences that result in a “meh!” reaction. Of course, joost didn’t mean to create a meh. And users certainly don’t want a meh. But it’s what happened.

I think people expected a really, really new-feeling experience. Chris’ description sounds like “Amigo TV” [I refuse to link to it, sorry. Google may be your friend] and even the ICI Media experiments with tagged and hyperlinked sports video [I think David Gratton’s new venture is music-oriented].

Getting to your big screen will take more than a nice platform.

Agreed! Why?

It’s all about content.

and

Using Joost certainly points out a void in the world that exists between the computers and the television today.

Yes. It’s very hard to get people to give up preprogrammed notions of “what TV is” and “what PCs are”. If you build your application and platform, from the ground up, with the idea that there is no difference in what each can do: you will find out what each thing is best at.

So you start to analyse problems differently.

Why email through the TV when I have a perfectly good computer on my lap already? But isn’t that great that I can get a “boxmail” that tells me what is cool on TV right now, this very moment, with an action-button to take me to the cool stuff?

Then more understanding comes: I can link the systems on the backend, so if people are using multiple forms of communication and entertainment at once, the data can be shared to enable something new.

My chat status changes automatically depending on what I am watching on TV or the top downloaded show’s latest episode is on right now or I’m going to guess what happens next and “spoiler” my friends.

But I, the author, won’t be telling people what to do and how to do it. I’ll just publish the data via an interface, actually create the mini-apps that will generate me revenue or attract an audience, and let the rest occur.