The Saavn channel on Joost is a harbinger of higher-quality P2P content than the short clips on YouTube. Joost, by the founders of Skype, focuses on television and in its current beta form is littered with ads for cell phones and chewing gum. The Saavn channel is like YouTube Bollyclips, but the short clips are larger and higher quality. The app did not work well on pokey Bombay ISPs, but it works reasonably well over a 15 Mbps cable modem.

A similar startup, Vudu, is doing P2P movie rentals. You can download the movies on demand, and chairman Alain Rossman (Openwave) claim the films start almost instantly because they’re cached on other nearby Vudu boxes. And the swarming approach resembles BitTorrent.

Vudu boxes that already have a certain movie on their hard drives — say, “The Godfather” — will send pieces of that movie to a nearby box when its owner suddenly gets a taste for the epic Mafia drama.

But to get those movies playing quickly, the Vudu engineers struck upon another notion: using a slice of the digital real estate on each Vudu box to store the beginning portions of each film. They also delved into the science of predictions. When the company determines that a movie is more likely to be rented or purchased — early in its release, for example — it will plant lengthier pieces of that film on unused portions of Vudu boxes in customer homes. [Link]

What Skype is to Vonage, Joost is to Vudu, in the sense that they’re doing a software-only solution. There’s no need to sell people on yet another box next to their phone or TV. Smart.

By the way, I can’t imagine Voodoo PC founder Rahul Sood is happy about Vudu’s name.