Nearly a year ago, Joost was getting tons of attention as the next great force in Internet television. A well-funded startup founded by the creators of Skype, the company was meant to put the best of TV and the Internet in one package. Armed with content partnerships with the likes of CNN, Adult Swim, Sony and Time Warner, it was hard to argue with the hype: The guys who reinvented the telephone were fast on their way to doing the same with television.

Fast forward to the present, and Joost has hardly lived up to its promises. Despite millions of downloads by early adopters, I can’t remember anyone ever saying to me: “I saw this great program on Joost last night…” In my view, there are a couple of reasons for this: First, the service quality is shaky. Almost every time I log in, I get an error message telling me that the program I want to watch is unavailable. In fact, as I prepped for this post, I figured I’d try one more time, only to be greeted with the following:

Ok, WTF? Second, the Joost client can be painfully slow. I’m writing this on a Dell XPS with 4 gigs of RAM and 2 video accelerator cards, and yet their menus still render at a crawl and the app often hangs between screens. Third, they never really delivered on the “best of the Internet.” One of the most compelling things about Joost is its open widget architecture. Theoretically, it’s supposed to let third parties tie in a boatload of external capabilities and feeds, but today I’ve seen nothing more compelling than a chat widget and a floating clock. Fourth, and most importantly, they haven’t made a serious play for the living room. Hey Joost: no matter how good your content is, I’m not trying to snuggle up in front of my computer to watch a full 30 minute show. Give me my couch.

All this aside, who’s doing IPTV right? Well, Apple is well on its way, but its the combination of Netflix and Microsoft that has me really excited. MS has been surprisingly fast at bringing long-form video content to the living room through Windows Media Center, and for some time now Netflix has been offering unlimited streaming of over 6,000 movies through it’s web-based ‘Watch Now’ feature. Combine them both, and you’ve got My Netflix, a third-party plugin that brings them together to let you watch full movies from your TV, without having to spend $2.99 a pop. Granted, you still need a Windows Media PC, but rumor has it that’s all going to change very soon, so we’re making progress.