You're downstairs, watching TV. Its pretty good quality, no real problem there but it strikes you that from what you've heard, Alex Lindsay would be tearing his hair out with everything from the color-depth to the resolution of the broadcast.

Total recall is on and David Hume is just about to walk around a creepy corner when suddenly he just stops in his tracks. Dead still, not moving at all. Has he noticed something on the floor? Is he interfacing with the Internet via some kind of retina display? No, because the clock on the wall next to him has stopped too and there is a sort of motion blur around his arm.

5 minutes later he jumps back to life, the clock resumes ticking, and he walks around the corner to find nothing but shadows. Suspense to the extreme? Welcome to Joost.

If you haven't heard of it, check it out at http://www.joost.com/; its going to revolutionize the way you watch, think-of and interact-with tv.

I've had a beta-version for a little while now, and I am in a lucky position to be able to review it, as it is, right now.

Imagine a TV on which you could choose what you wanted to watch, when you wanted to watch it. Its all out there, everything that's been released on the tv, so far, to date. Want to check up on an old episode of Joey? Did Michael ever do anything about his chicken-legs, and get hooked up with the hot girl from the fish-store? Pick up the remote, use it like a cell phone keyboard and type in Joey Fish store, and satisfy that little niggling curiosity.

That's the potential I think that Joost has. But right now? Well the quality is good enough, but not good enough to keep Alex Lindsay's hair on. HD is far, far away right now, but entirely feasible in the future I'm sure.

You see, Joost is tv content delivered via the Internet.

There are going to be some bugs to work out though, the GUI isn't really that great. Yes its shiny, yes its semi-transparent, glass-like and slick, but is it easy to use? No way!

I think that Joost need to get their act together in that respect, they need to bring over more of the features and feel from (for instance) the Sky Satellite GUI, or just your average cable tv gui. It's what we're used to, and right now it's working great. Sure, implement some enhancements. Joost has already brought in more features for its GUI than Sky could dream of. There are thumbnail images of what each channel looks like, funky 'My Channels', and Smart channels; it's all just a little foreign though, the enhancements are good, but they need to be a litle more familiar.

When Joost makes it into our living rooms ( I don't think there's any doubt about if it will ), we don't want to learn a whole new system of channel navigation. Joost has built support right in for the Apple remote, I'd like to see them make that jump and build support in for the Fox cable remote, Sky remote and whatever else is out there.

Joost is borderline standard media broadcasting. It's tv, but its not a podcast. It doesn't quite make it out into the equal, free playing field yet, and if you ask me, that's what is going to get it right into your living room. Media corporations are going to be more willing to take one small step at a time in the direction of equal playing field broadcasting, rather than making the big jump in there.

I can see a future version of Apple TV with Joost built right into it. In fact, someone could get started hacking the box (albeit an elegant, popcorn-popping sleek shiny grey cube), and sticking a Joost player right on there.

So on a final note, the advertisements; oh yes, the dreaded word. Well in actual fact, I simply love the approach Joost have taken. Its one ad at a time, not 20, 30 or 40. Its 1 minute of advertisement, 10 minutes of show, 1 minute of advertisement... etc. Its all in bite-sized chunks. Admirable.

My suggestions would be to include a few pre-loaded advertisements with the Joost install and then if the user's connection stalls, play them from the hard-disk, whilst buffering the broadcast in the background. It would mean that people with slower connections would see a lot more ads, but it would give a more smooth experience, and I doubt that they'd notice.

So ladies & gentlemen, Joost has the potential and its delivering a good chunk of it right now. I've been a little tough on it, but at the end of the day, its in beta and I've seen beta applications completely transform and dominate as their production cycle matures. Expect to see it on your Apple TV soon.

Happy Mac'ing!