The downloadable application service was discontinued towards the end of December 2008. The web based service contains everything the downloadable application had and more. In my opinion this is a great shame however as the downloadable application front end was excellent and very user friendly in comparison to the web based service.

Disclaimer

I can NOT and do NOT recommend that anyone breaks TV Catch Up’s terms and conditions of use in any way what-so-ever. Not knowing TV Catch Up didn’t work with UK Online, I logged in once on my friends PC to demonstrate to him the service working, just before he attempted to sign up when I was surprised he couldn’t use the service. Releasing my error, I totally respect TV Catch Up’s conditions of use and my friend doesn’t watch TV Catch Up while connected with UK Online.

The Joost software application remains as a Beta testing download and has been Beta for sometime. If Joost is running on a fair PC with a reasonable graphics card and a half decent broadband connection, Joost is great although quite heavy on bandwidth. I tried to set-up Joost on one of my older PCs so I could watch Internet TV while using my main PC, but I discovered that Joost is one of the most resource hungry Internet TV applications there is. I found that if Joost runs okay, usually all the other applications will run smoothly.

I always use Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 at the time of writing as I find Windows Vista slower and more hungry for resources, this is more noticeable the slower the PC.

I first attempted to run Joost on an old Intel Celeron 1GHz PC with only 256MB SDRAM and an awful on-board 82810 Intel graphics card that used up to 32MB of shared memory. There was absolutely no chance of success as Joost simply gave a fatal error about not being able to initialise the 3D graphics adapter every time it tried to start. I tested various drivers and tried tweaking to no avail. I couldn’t even upgrade the graphics card to anything reasonable as the PC’s motherboard was without even an AGP slot, let alone a PCI-Express slot.

I then tried to run Joost on a slightly better Intel Celeron 1.7GHz PC with 640MB SDRam and a very old ATI Rage Pro 128 AGP graphics card with just 16MB of on-board memory. Joost actually loaded this time, but it was virtually unwatchable as it kept freezing repeatedly every few seconds, missing out lots of frames and jumping. I then upgraded to a slightly newer NVidia Quatro AGP graphics card with 64MB of memory and Joost almost ran okay, but still missed some frames out intermittently. I had to reduce the screen resolution from 1024×768 to 800×600 for Joost to run smoothly.