As a media-addicted person who can’t stand conventional television (I shut off my cable service in 2004), I’m always looking for new ways to feed my film & video jones. For television programs that people recommend, I usually BitTorrent . For news video, I can usually find a decent stream somewhere on the web. For film, I rent a lot of DVD’s, and catch the couple of big-screen-worthy films released each year in an actual theater, usually at matinee prices. Yes, I’m a cheap bastard. That’s why I was intrigued last year when I heard that the guys who created Skype and the much-litigated Kazaa (Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis) were working on a project called Joost , a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer technology. Although I signed up as an early Beta user, the available content at launch time didn’t thrill me, so I waited until today to try it. If you want some television-like content on your computer, you HAVE to try this. After a reasonable download (11MB) and a very simple account setup, I was browsing an amazing variety of worthwile content. Media partners include A&E, PBS, National Geographic, CBS, BET, and many, many more. According to their site, 28,000+ shows and 480+ channels. You can download Joost here.