It seems that Joost doesn’t run on Macs without an Intel processor.

On the other hand, the BBC’s iPlayer doesn’t run on any Macs at all.

So, you know, could be worse.

I’m particularly sad about the loss of Joost, because they apparently have episodes of Total Recall 2070. At least for those of us outside the North American continent.

I saw maybe three or four episodes of the series around the time it was released, really liked it, and have never seen or heard of it since. Although the pilot was released on DVD, the series itself never was.

All of which leads me to an interesting insight:

I was looking forward to Joost, while I’m not interested in the iPlayer.

Which suggests that the value (at least to this particular pundit) in online streaming of TV is for archive and rarity value rather than catchup, which is well-served by PVRs already.

I’m trying to figure out a way to call down some science on this, instead of it just being one man’s opinion.

Because, you know, I think we’ve actually got enough of that on the Internet already.

…

OK, back now. Try this.

Hypothesis: PVR viewing will mostly be of recently-recorded shows
Prediction: Shows will be deleted after a few weeks if they haven’t been watched
Possible metric: When a series has been season-passed, deletions will rise proportionally to the number of weeks since the last episode was watched.

Hypothesis: Internet viewing will tend towards rare and unavailable material
Prediction: Downloads of films from bittorrent sites should drop when the film is released on DVD
Possible metric: Bittorrent server logs will show less requests.

Hypothesis: Internet TV viewers will be more loyal to downloads than PVR viewers
Prediction: Shows downloaded to a PC will not be deleted as quickly as shows downloaded to a PVR
Possible metric: Torrented shows should stay on computer hard drives longer than PVRd shows stay on the PVR hard drive. Use timestamps on the computers to get the data.

As ever, should anyone actually have some cold, hard facts that can refute or substantiate these theories instead of blathering on about how web 2.0 is changing the world, please let me know.

Also appreciated: better ways of testing these predictions.