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April 5, 2008

Joost To Undertake Major Restructure

Duncan Riley

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picture-233.pngJoost is said to be preparing a “major retrenchment” of staff as part of a restructure that will see Joost abandon its global ambitions for the US only.

According to the Sunday Times, Joost has struggled to convince media and sports companies to sell it global rights, which are usually offered on a country by country basis. The Times reports that Joost still has money in the bank and “Joost is unlikely to close, however. “There are too many egos involved,” said one former employee.” Joost denied that staff would be retrenched, saying only that “There are some situations where staff have been re-aligned to better fit our needs.”

Erick wrote in October that the clock is ticking for Joost:

There’s a time bomb out there with Joost’s name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streams—the main selling point of Joost’s peer-to-peer Internet TV client software—is quickly coming to the Web….the vast majority of that video is not exclusive to Joost. All the Internet TV services are lining up the same content. And better-quality video is not going to remain a differentiator for long.

…Joost’s P2P approach is not a benefit to the consumer as much as it is a benefit to Joost (because it offloads the bandwidth costs of the most popular video streams to the users themselves). But streaming video on the Web is about to get a whole lot cheaper—and as Web video advertising takes off, a whole lot more lucrative. Some people argue that once the economics kick in, centralized Web streaming will offer a better, more consistent viewing experience than P2P streaming.

Set up by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Joost offered much promise, but has failed to deliver anything unique at a time when online video became the hottest vertical on the web. The restructure cant hurt, but with ongoing intense competition, Joost may well be on borrowed time.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Zach Weisman

    April 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm

    They need to restructure the software itself. Installing their application is not something the mass population will do, especially when there are alternative methods of viewing quality HD broadcasts online that require no software installation…

  2. aandarian

    April 5th, 2008 at 6:54 pm

    45M, jeez. check out the quality these guys are doing. have to download player but its worth it.

    http://memocast.com/hdmovies.aspx

  3. Alan Wilensky

    April 5th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    How is streaming video delivery costs about to get much cheaper? Is there some hidden dynamic or economic macro process that the cited author is privy to that we mere mortals have not been clued into?

    There are CDN’s and and CDN’s, and these costs are never going to see a quantum drop - unless there is a major industry shakeout due to secondary economic effects. What am I missing here - what event is about to drive CDN costs into the basement?

  4. CARversation.com

    April 5th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    good

  5. Rajiv Singh

    April 5th, 2008 at 10:32 pm

    Why don’t you delete posts of fuckin spammers like 4. ?

  6. barzini

    April 5th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

    Funded by old media companies like CBS and Viacom, Joost has to overcome obstacles from, ironically, old media. Hurdles to gain international broadcast rights are just the beginning, plus, U. S. cable and satellite dish companies are not going to sit idly by and let people cancel their subscriptions to watch TV shows on computers (the purported “reason for being” of Joost).

    When we sit in front of our computers, the last thing most of us want to do is to watch a full-length TV show. An episode of sitcom is 22 minutes, while drama is 44 minutes, without commercials. If a person chooses to “veg out” for 22 minutes, he might as well be leaning back in a comfortable sofa, instead of hunching forward on a computer chair.

    Hulu will follow Joost’s fate — different plot, same ending.

  7. NickeyD

    April 6th, 2008 at 12:59 am

    Joost must focus to its P2P video distribution network, like BitTorrentTV. They have some really good media partnerships, but that stupid Mozilla-based viewer software is really clouding their eyes. They are about to become PointCast 2008.

  8. jsl

    April 6th, 2008 at 1:03 am

    I am unimpressed by the Joost delivery to date. I cannot believe that there is mass market appeal for the plethora of incredibly uninteresting, amateur “videos” that they currently offer. I think there is a curiosity value that very quickly wears off.

    However I do beleive there is a future in P2P or other delivery modes for direct TV streaming on the PC. Like Zattoo now over 40 channels - proper ones - Germany, and Livestation with its news platform. There are other niche areas particularly like sport where there will be a mass market, and which can be paid for by advertising. I am sure there are others.

  9. Shane

    April 6th, 2008 at 3:28 am

    This is not surprising in the list. As someone who lives outside of the US, it has been painfully obvious to me that all the ‘good’ content (for varying values of ‘good’) have only been available in the US due to licensing deals. The rest of us (especially Asia-Pacific) have been lumped with crap that the figured no one was watching anyway so why not off load it on to someone else?

    Joost will probably now wither and die. As far as I can see it’s only hope was to offer the best content to everyone, no matter where they lived. While the quality was pretty good for streaming, I guess the ride is over.

    I won’t miss it.

  10. Avatar X

    April 6th, 2008 at 3:44 am

    There was only one flaw Joost had from the start. their client. choosing something based on mozilla borrowed code was the worst they could do. it to miro (before democracy player) almost 2 years to get the client right, how long has sunbird being in development again?, how long for seamonkey?. what was that other company that relied too much on being on firefox only that costed them everything they had been working for over a year?. oh right, Allpeers.

    i think Joost development came a year too early. right now they would have been able to choose a better platform and went with it done in Flex/AIR or Silverlight/.Net or even Javafx if they desired on both the browser and the desktop.

    and i said that because i alpha tested, and beta tested Joost in 10 different machine set ups. right now, the recent version only installs right in 9 of those computers and only is able to run well in 4 with only 1 set up having a great experience with the joost client. i think you can see the problem.

    i am not saying anything bad about joost service or idea, just that the client base was as fragile as caramel glass from the start.

    another example can be had at Miro. it only started working right when it struck into its 1.0 version… how many versions later we are talking about for it to work right?.

    I think the only people truly good with Mozilla code and xul are the guys at mozilla, everyone else i have seen developing standalone apps or big firefox apps have been a pain to use with only one exception to the rule: Flock.

  11. A former Joost employee

    April 6th, 2008 at 4:42 am

    Hello, I am a former Joost employee. The real story is of course very different.

    The mood inside the company has been very very bad for several months now, primarily due to the fact that there hasn’t been a whole lot of consumer uptake of the product itself. One problem was the lack of good content users really want. The content team was spreading itself too thinly, was all over the map, and could not get really attractive content on the system.

    Then there was the issue with the former CTO of Joost, Dirk-Willem van Gulik who was eventually fired. He was a self-centric, condescending jerk who had an extremely demoralizing effect on anyone in his team and the company at large who had to interact with him. I think in my entire life I can’t remember having met anyone I enjoyed working with less. Eventually he was laid off, but he left a demoralized group and an ill-designed product behind. After he left, first there was a big part (”Jerk-Willem is finally gone”), but then his own people had to spend a log time “cleaning” behind him. Apparently he had made a series of decisions without the buyin of his own group. Sad story. The player has gotten a little better since, but it still is far too complicated to use, with too many bells and whistles the end user doesn’t really want. I feel very sorry for the people at the BBC who will have to put up with him now.

    With all this going on behind the scenes, the investors are beginning to be really nervous. The burn rate always was (and still is) way too high relative to the progress the company is making on all fronts. Faced with very limited consumer adoption, management began to hastily consider other options. One of them was to use the technology to stream live sports events, but there was no analysis of the market whatsoever, just one observation that Livestation, another service operating out of the UK seems to focus on News. From this alone Joost concluded that Sports must be a good thing to go after. The test a few weeks ago turned into a desaster, just Google Joost March Madness beta test, and you will understand why. The technology isn’t really built to haneld live events. There is a big data center in Leider, where most of their content is stored for on-demand viewing. But live is different as it involves encoding the data stream in real time before sending it on to the users.

    Now they are stuck. The only other option would be to retransmit regular television, simlar to what Zattoo is doing. But how can they possibly catch up with their already about 2 million viewers in all the major markets in Europe.

    They are about to panic. Money burning fast. I think they will pull out of Europe altogether, and “focus” on the US. But why should they be ore successful there? Hulu, Veoh, Vuze and others are already entering the space. Personally I think they are all doomed. Why? Because that is not really what consumers want.

  12. Matt_

    April 6th, 2008 at 4:53 am

    Joost doesn’t need the Mozilla client to stream video but they do need a client of some type to do p2p possibly a lightweight browser plugin.

    The Times article is blown way out of proportion Joost got rid of some of its marketing staff in London and Hired Jason Gedeke formerly of CableLabs and Comcast and a whole lot of other Comcast Interactive staff (a clue they are moving to a web centric model).This is a slow news story that’s about a week old .

    I think this is the marketing staff emailing as many news organisations that will take notice personally .

    http://newteevee.com/2008/03/2.....m-trimmed/

    http://newteevee.com/2008/03/2.....architect/

  13. Spinmonkey

    April 6th, 2008 at 7:48 am

    “When we sit in front of our computers, the last thing most of us want to do is to watch a full-length TV show.”

    There are millions of people out there that don’t get 500 channels on their tv sets so sitting in front of their computer to watch a non-network show is the only way they can do it. I like the Hulu model. They run short ads during shows but at least I can keep up to date on all my favorite episodes. And I have a very comfy office chair to watch them from.

  14. jenkins

    April 6th, 2008 at 8:03 am

    I’ve been saying this for months. They don’t have an Internet CEO and don’t have a proper market. Add them to the deadpool! The party is over!

  15. Kenotic

    April 6th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    I wanted to like Joost. I really, really did. However the crappy, jumpy player kept me from enjoying watching the shows. Wading through the glitchy navigation didn’t help either. The limited list of programming that was either unique or interesting kept me from going to too often. I cannot imagine signing up for Joost to watch CNN and sports highlights when you can just go to CNN and ESPN and see them without the message “The program you are looking for is not available, please try again later.”

    Those of us wanting a replacement for cable online are going to have to wait. There are too many greedy people unwilling to take a chance.

  16. Stan Oslavsky

    April 6th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    It’s a big hurdle to get people to download an application that handles video downloads, regardless of the quality issue. The majority of consumers are anxious to view something when they select it and not to have to wait for it to download, or be forced to learn some unwieldy software application with lots of functions that are beyond end-users comprehension.
    Most of all, who can really trust P2P apps and what evil could be lurking from hackers who could take control of someone’s PC through a seemingly benign movie download.
    Maybe if the management and developers learned something from Apple iTunes, they would have scaled back to the simplest interface that provides a clear means-to-an-end.
    Otherwise, I’m with the rest of the population that would rather watch web-based flash video, pixelated or not.

  17. TheObviousQuestion

    April 6th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    Obviously, I have another major question:

    WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR NBC DIRECT? The P2P soon to be “HD” download client that they are trying to launch? I mean, if Joost could not make it offering a wide content library, does anyone believe that product will survive beyond `08 only carrying super-DRM’ed NBC content?

    Joost did absolutely nothing that was defendable — that is why they failed. These services are successful because of their content library, the best user experience in the world cannot overcome a lack of depth/ breadth of content offerings. Additionally, that content must be exclusive otherwise consumers will flock to N number of channels.

    So long Joost! I’m also waiting to wave goodbye to Veoh soon to!!

  18. Insider

    April 6th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    I know what “re-aligned to fit our needs” means. It means that the high-priced ad sales team that they hired no longer makes sense. The entire team came from MTV with the expectation that there would be significant budget devoted to Joost and online video in 2007/2008. Now that’s not happening and, from what I hear, the development team refuses to listen to the realities of the marketplace. That’s why you see a lot of their sales team heading for greener pastures…

  19. chris

    April 6th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    I live in Australia and have not experienced jumpy video or long delays woth Joost - the service has always worked fine for me. Does “Joost abandon its global ambitions for the US only” mean that I won’t be able to access Joost any more (I actually like watching the very old black and white movies that they offer)?

    Also, I don’t watch Joost on a PC - I have a mini mac plugged into a plasma screen - and I suspect many other people around the world would have similar configurations. I think it would be a real shame to see Joost fail. They just need to get some better programming - more scifi movies/old tv shows would be good place to start.

  20. misanthropy today

    April 6th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    To show how disconnected the silicon valley and the tech crowd is from the end user, at the 2007 web 2.0 expo Joost was the toast of the town. It may have even won some award or something— I dont remember. I was like “are these people joking?” But you know how fashion goes.

    The tech intelligentsia are always wrong. Always. If you’re an investor, go to a convention and find the booth with nobody milling around it and invest there.

  21. Nicholas Chambers

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:17 am

    Nobody needs a video-streaming service without a good content library. YouTube and its, ahem, “adult content derivative” are still on the top. Why? Because they have content to offer. It’s quite as simple that.

  22. Adam Martin

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:38 am

    I was an alpha tester on Joost and had several early discussions with them regarding creating new content for the service. The people I met there, who shall remain nameless, were great and enthusiastic - but from our perspective the project seemed to be led by the complex tech rather than focusing on creating or securing a decent user base, which frankly needs to watch something that isn’t Worlds Strongest Man!

    Methinks Babelgum is heading for the deadpool sooner, but Joost has the leverage and good will (still?) to re-invent itself, so here’s a thought, turn yourself into a digital film production company, finance low budget comedies, release them online and in cinema’s at same time - make content so attractive, people want to use Joost, let them watch your film, blog about it, promote it and watch the cinema audience who wouldn’t sit through 90 minutes of sub Borat on a laptop go see it at the local multiplex. It’s a world away from where they’re at, but they’ve lost any competetive edge and need to regain momentum and a radical shift in how they view content is the only way.

  23. H

    April 7th, 2008 at 7:08 am

    The current state of legal video entertainment online is really pathetic, and it’s probably because of copyright laws.

    Joost I believe is an excellent platform, it delivers high quality video with almost no waiting, I’m one of the people who decided to lower their monthly cable bills to just have High speed internet and a laptop connected to my HDTV.

    I try to get entertained on Joost, Hulu, YouTube, Google Video (which hosts lots of pirated-bad-quality-full-length-movies ), MegaVideo, cheap used DVDs on Amazon, and I’m considering returning to Netflix (a 4th time after quitting 3 times for stolen DVDs in the mail) since you just can’t sit down in front of your TV and watch whatever you want, whenever you want in this day and age of information. It’s just ridiculous the only way to do that is going to torrent trackers since the content mafia can’t manage to offer their stuff legally.
    This is why I’d be more than happy to pay those $5 extra on my ISP if you legally allow me to download whatever I want, since legal stuff is just uncapable of entertaining… no joke people preffer to watch stupid clips on youtube. It’s too hard to get the good stuff if you’re an average user.

    It’s all a human problem really. The day the MPAA and all major content producers realize they could be making a lot of money on advertisement on ALL of their content, instead of suing their customers, implementing ridiculous DRM, and loosing it to millions of free bittorrent downloads (that even get awesome fansubs for every other language - and are online minutes after releases, see Rome, Dexter, Lost…) then we’ll be able to throw away our stupid cable service.

    If you have cable, the only way to somewhat enjoy it is by having a DVR, which allows you to watch what some of what you care when you want (but not what you want since it all depends on aired content which you have no control of) while allowing you to somewhat skip through 80% of the ads.

    The world is in desperate need of new copyright laws. If not ask BMG who recently published an academic study that they found 95% of teens copy music (CDs, and hardrive sharing, not p2p)

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