Joost launches streaming video app for iPhone

The new app lets you stream hundreds of TV shows, movies, and music videos to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It's not perfect, and you can only stream videos over Wi-Fi—but hey, it's free.

Available now on the iTunes app store, the new Joost iPhone app is easy enough to use; once installed, you can search and browse Joost's (ad-supported) catalog of TV shows (including "Survivor," "Jericho," "CSI," "Smallville," and "Dexter"), movies (such as "The Fifth Element," "Men in Black," "A League of Their Own," "Starship Troopers," "My Best Friend's Wedding," and "Air Force One"), as well as music videos and shorts. (Click here for more info on Joost.)

Select a video, and a landscape-oriented viewer pops up, complete with play/pause controls, skip forward/reverse buttons, a volume control, and a progress slider. Considering that we're talking streaming video here, image quality on my iPhone was excellent—almost as good as the videos you can buy/rent over iTunes. Buffering can take some time, though; music videos start playing almost immediately, but a two-hour feature took about four minutes before it started playing.

Pretty cool, but as I said right off the bat, the Joost iPhone player isn't perfect. First of all, you can only stream videos over Wi-FI; if you're using your iPhone's 3G or EDGE connection, you're outta luck.

Also, browsing videos over the app can be a pain. Looking for a movie is easy enough, but TV episodes aren't grouped by series; instead, you must plow through a long list of individual episodes, and there's no easy way to tell in the listings whether a given selection is a full episode or just a clip.

Another problem: You can't log into your Joost account over the app, which means you won't be able to access your favorites.

That said, it's hard to complain too much considering that the Joost app is free, and hopefully improvements will come in future updates.

Also, a quick message to Joost streaming-video competitors such as Hulu and Vimeo: You seeing this?