“A video destination is just really hard to differentiate,” said Verjee. “It’s really far away from a must-buy for an advertiser or a must-go-to for a consumer.” Verjee is not wrong. With mainstream video content it’s not just hard, it’s IMPOSSIBLE.

Every studio views the internet as just A N OTHER distribution platform, an inert pipe, where they can count up more eyeballs and sell or share more advertising. Networks/Broadcasters such as MTV distribute to anyone that asks, as long as they take the lions share of revenue. How do you differentiate when your competitors have the same content?

GoFish like many others are playing into the hands of today’s dominant players. This strategy does not pay off, the studios/labels will increase the take year after year until they bleed the market dry. Economically, this is no different than what’s happeninged in the music business where people like Bolt and very recently Pandora [UK] have given up because of trouble licensing music for distribution. It just becomes too expensive and unviable.

If you want to differentiate, if you want to have a dominant strategy, you have to start again, build from the ground up and rearchitect the value system. It isn’t easy. You need a revolutionary mindset. You need to reinvent TV.

This means revisiting how video is conceived, produced, delivered and experienced by viewers. From an advertising perspective it means reinventing TV marketing altogether. Advertising can no longer mean, “distribute content bundled with ads to its network partners”. Oh let’s just “bundle” some pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, banner ads. This adds ZERO value to the viewer experience, in fact it is detrimental, check out the negative comments on Joost’s Forum re: advertising.

We can’t build on the decaying foundations of the current TV business. There are a bunch of very clever writers striking in Hollywood who could really help shape this, they’ve been trying to advance the video experience for years but have always been stifled by the paymasters [networks].

Now with Viacom doing this what’s the point of Joost?