With the Joost hype machine cranking into overdrive, this little gem is nipping at Joost’s heels and has barely caused a ripple in the Internet pond. However that’s not to say that this is a site to be dismissed. Whilst Joost is an IPTV solution, it’s still dependent on a separate piece of client software installed on your desktop/laptop computer. This does however have the advantage of giving you a very rich environment in which to watch the provided content. Chime.tv has gone for the totally portable, web based solution and has still managed to pull off quite an interesting and full featured interface all of it’s own.

Both Chime.tv and Joost have a variety of channels from which to choose. Each of these channels has a range of hand picked content. Chime.tv draws it’s selections from the many videos available on YouTube, Google Video, Veoh and a whole host of other video sites. Whilst the content is somewhat limited, it is however of a fairly high quality, in content that is.

When watching YouTube videos, everyone has come to expect less than perfect video quality. On the whole this fails to be a significant problem, when played at the usual default YouTube page size. However when watched via Chime.tv at full screen, the pixelated quality is all to prevalent. If you are watching in your browser at full size, the quality soon gets in the way of the user experience, however when watching via a regular TV, if you have your desktop/laptop hooked up and you are watching from a distance, this is a minor annoyance. It does however become an issue, the higher the quality of your TV display, especially high definition flat screens. On the whole however it’s something you get used to pretty quickly and doesn’t distract too much.

Certainly an engaging site. It will be interesting to see if they manage to keep the available channels fresh and interesting.