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)

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.