Recently, Vic Cherikoff and I signed a deal with Joost to establish a cooking show channel called Australian Food TV on the Joost network. Last week it finally went live.

For those that don’t know, Joost is a brand new internet television service which uses peer to peer technology by the founders of Skype – Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

Unlike user generated online video websites such as youtube, Joost is comprised only of professional content only and has recently signed a number of high profile US cable networks such as CNN, MTV, National Geographic as well as a number of music channels such as Warner Bros Music and Ministry of Sound.

The quality of the video on Joost is simply amazing for being broadcast over the internet. On a wired broadband connection the video is seamless, but over my WIFI connection there were a few jitters, but absolutely watchable. Video on Joost is like you’re watching a DVD on your computer. It isn’t HDTV, but it is close. There is a combination of videos encoded at 4:3 as well some encoded at 16:9 format.

Our Australian Food TV Channel will put the spotlight on Australia and help to further build the profile of Australian foods and Australian cuisine overseas. There are predictions Joost will conservatively attract 25 million viewers by the end of 2007 and rise to over 100 million in short order, making the audience bigger than the Food Network in the USA.

In the coming months we’ll be creating new video content of recipes, interviews with well known Australian chefs, information on foods from the Aboriginal people and cooking up some dishes. Initially we’ll be broadcasting episodes of our cooking show, Dining Downunder.

It’s interesting how things happen and us developing the channel on Joost stems from an article I first wrote about my thoughts about Joost when it was called the Venice Project. 42 minutes after I published that article on my website, I had an email from Joost asking about what content I could provide. The power of the internet! 5 days late I met with the Joost team in New York and we did a deal.

Watch the Australian Food TV Channel on Joost now.