Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Couch potato
RARELY watch TV, but this weekend I was a couch potato. Instead of sitting in front of the television set, however, I watched a bunch of shows on my notebook computer. No, I didn’t scour YouTube for the latest home videos. Instead, I watched full-length documentaries on nature, travel and food; ancient cartoons like Little Lulu and Betty Boop; news parodies from the Onion News Network; old black-and-white features like Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Tarzan; and 1960s TV shows such as Bonanza and the Monkees. My weekend entertainment was provided free courtesy of Joost, a program that distributes TV shows and other forms of video over the Internet using peer-to-peer TV technology created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who developed the Internet telephony program Skype and the file-sharing application Kazaa.
