I don’t think anyone disagrees that video content is one of the most important and influential content mediums today especially with the advent of the Internet and the wide availability of fast always on connections we now have more choice of con…

- I hope you get sleep / what is more important than your health?

- Please revisit when you decided to die for money / and realize it wasnt worth it

- Get some sleep my Friend, RB

While I know they have issue with Goog, not sure Viacom would pass up the $$…

BTW - Goog is obsecnely arrogant and smell of Microsoft of yore. Good to see them get kicked. They really think they know it all and everyone owes them an audience. That they understand and YOU do not.

it may or may not be appropriate to say these two services mirror the relation of a live concert/performance to the physical album. what do you think?

A lot of the business development people at Joost came from Viacom/MTV. That has had a huge impact on the outcome of some of the early big deals for Joost. I’m a huge believer in Joost, since they don’t have to deal with the bandwidth costs of hosting long, high quality video content. Consider what a huge business advantage that is for Joost over Google!

Also note that eBay invested money into Joost, and some of the key Joost people were or are eBay employees. In my mind, it makes for a fascinating situation that Joost and YouTube are fighting it out in the video realm, owned in full or part by eBay and Google respectively. To add to the intrigue, half or so of the YouTube employees came directly out of PayPal.

It’s a crazy world we live in and the human element has played a huge role in how this battle is panning out! Looking forward to the future coverage!

Why are they handing over such a core part of their business (advertising) to someone else? Even if it takes a billion dollars and a decade to get it done, it’s imperative for large media companies to be able to monetize themselves on the web, if they want to compete in the future.

Panama is Yahoo’s advert platform, not Yahoo’s search platform.

Panama “just” affects the ads displayed, not search results.

It’s almost like it’s a real blog again…

Looks like I’ll miss you at MESH in Toronto in late May, but it would have been fun.

Good to see Yahoo! winning again. Google is a wonderful company, but they’re not always right, and their entry in a market does not always mean that they’ll dominate it (dMarc is a good example, but the list is long).

Of course Joost and YouTube compete, but the world is big and life is long, and there will be other entrants before the world goes IPTV in earnest.

This Yahoo! deal smells like Sumner Redstone just couldn’t bear to deal with Google given the YouTube copyright issues. I honestly doubt it’s anything more - especially given the fact that Panama is so young. If you don’t think elder Chairmen can influence a deal based on passion, I know some prominent Canadians you might want to meet.

The IPTV world will usher in a pain among content owners and purveyors equivalent to that felt in the music industry, and perhaps worse. The “long tail” in video content production will be much harder to sit through than the equivalent indie music scene - witness the dearth of good amateur content on YouTube. Half the time, the good stuff turns out to be a corporate plant.

Joost doesn’t necessarily win any more that Creative Labs or Live365 necessarily won. They’re just an early (admittedly compelling) entrant.

Another anonymous troll here LOL. From my perspective, I am glad Viacom is sticking it to Google so to speak.

Google’s level of arrogance is beyond anything I have seen in recent years. Larry and Sergey are two lucky tech head chumps with zero business acumen and full of themselves. Do no evil my ass, what are they, 3 years old? When Google first started, they couldn’t even get themselves bought by Yahoo or anyone else.

The real Google star is Schmidt who turned it into a business giant and at the same time knows how to stroke Larry and Sergey’s egos to keep them happy. That said, Google still thinks that they own the world and I am glad there someone is knocking them down a peg or two.

“I think a fair criticism would be “how do you know Yahoo didn’t just earn this deal outright?” I’d answer that with an observation that the Panama platform is still very young, and it would be unlikely Viacom would sign up for a multi-year deal with no guarantees without more assurances. You could counter that I don’t know for sure that there are no guarantees. I’d have to agree, and point only to the CNN article that called this a standard-type partner deal.”

Trying to be your own critic, that interests me