This post’s author, The Media Patriot, is a fellow consumer who enjoys music and television but condemns DRM. His pseudonym pays homage to the original participants of the Boston Tea Party.

Remember back in the Autumn of 2006 when the hotly anticipated “Venice Project” promised all that it’d do for television, what ebay and Skype did for auctions and phone calls? Well, here we are two years later and after much disappointment, Joost has released a new version of itself called…drum roll…New Joost.

New Joost is supposedly a “browser only” plugin that let’s you watch Joost content in the browser – but’s that’s a bit of a misleading statement. New Joost downloads and installs a 6MB version of Microsoft C++ Runtime Environment onto your hard drive.

As much as I would like to share my New Joost experience with all ZNF readers, I cannot since after installing the plugin, CPU usage spiked at 99% for several minutes and crashed the browser to an unrecoverable state. To add to insult to injury, after killing off the hung browser, the plugin was still running siphoning off my bandwidth to power all the other people using Joost.

The Joost blog promises an all Flash, no local anything version coming in October, but it may be a bit too late since Hulu has pretty much filled the niche market Joost hoped to dominate all those years ago.

Have you tried the New Joost? Write a quick note in the comments with your thoughts.