• http://www.joost.com/

Joost has allowed its beta testers an unlimited number of invites. If you'd like one, send me an email mentioning this post to bryanttATdickinson.edu.

For those unfamiliar with Joost, it's basically an online TV service with some fairly big name channels, including Comedy Central, MTV, and the NHL. They are clearly trying to add a social element to TV viewing with Channel chatting and other features on the way. There are also some foreign language channels including ShortsTV, SiVoo and JumpTV in Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic. You'll find them under Entertainment in the channel directory. This could be another way for us to connect our students with native speakers while giving them a context for discussion.

Joost was created by the same people who make Skype and Kazaa.  It's taking advantage of p2p networking with everything that entails. Note: it seems to use about 600kbs of bandwidth whether you're actually watching Joost or just letting it sit in the taskbar. You have to close it completely to stop the network traffic.