Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year, giving up on P2P, and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube.
Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog, theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feeds, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious.
Earlier this year, Joost was added to the Boxee media directory, but I think this is a more significant partnership.
Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, and it has famously replaced leading local social networks in many countries in Europe and Arabic speaking regions as community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Targeting mostly young people, it’s been actively looking to expand its array of entertainment services, most recently with the addition of multi-player games and now with videos from Joost. I think both will benefit from this and further anchor their position in Europe while everyone seems to be looking at what happens in the U.S and Asia.
Netlog raised €5 million from Index Ventures in April 2007. For the sake of comparison, Joost raised $45 million, coincidentally in part from the same investor, who we recently reported raised a new €350 million venture fund.
One good thing about Joost is they see content aggregation as a platform unlike HULU who considers itself to be a Walled Garden who’s owners NBCU and News Corp asks HULU to block any 3rd party service that uses HULU which gets any major publicity .
If the US market is so saturated (which it is), maybe companies should focus overseas. Build a base there. Could be more difficult, but if there is strong demand w/ fewer competitors, why wouldn’t you???
Admittedly, this is a bad analogy given current events, but AIG started overseas, and grew to become a major financial services player.
I completely agree, start overseas and move slowly to US market for capitalization.
I completely agree, start overseas and move slowly to US market for capitalization.
loopcity.com
Cool stuff
Bad move.
Netlog is bad. Most of the content on Netlog is barely legal. That’s all I’ll say.
No, most of the content on Netlog is illegal.
My biggest problem with Joost is that their website is an utter mess. It looks like they have great content, but finding it is confusing.
They list “shows” that they have, but often it turns out to be only snippets instead of full episodes.
A simple search engine that will allow me to search for say “Full Episodes –> Comedy –> Some old show they’re allowed to put on the web” would be much appreciated.
As a proof via discete mathematics of why Joost is irrelevant:
If you have exclusive high value professional content then your product will succeed.
Joost has no exclusive high value professional contentt.
Therefore, Joost will not succeed.
Inference via. modus ponens.
Wrong application of Modus Ponens.
Your inference:
P->Q
not (P)
not (Q) ? cannot say
See http://en.wikip...cal_implication
Argh, my argument is as irrelevant as Joost is.
Does 1+1 = 10?
More likely, 1+1 = 0. Natta.
Just an opinion.
Joost – one could write a book about how to invent a market and then do everything wrong to mess it up.
To credit Joost they where the first ones to convince big media to take part in the internet tv revolution and they did deliver something nice. But the overly technical, peer to peer app that no one wanted to use, current messy website that have so many unnecessary features and cross links, lack of content, poor brand recognition, the fact that they run from eight offices around the world and that no one really knows what is going on, is nothing compered to the arrogance these people have. From the get-go they had more attitude than anyone I’ve ever met in big or small media or any other industry.
Joost has a lot of short content, and music videos that are worth sharing. But from day one when they released the flash player, I’ve been asking them to make their default embed code to be blog friendly (size wise).
640×360 won’t fit in any blog, and bloggers will be turned off if they have to be changing the code manually everytime they want to embed from Joost, I gave up after 2 videos.
425×344!!!!!!!!!
Simple UI experience details like this make me think that Joost underestimates the power of virality and convenience, 2 things that YouTube understood from the very beginning.
How Joost is different from Hulu now ? Worse content and crappier web-site ? As p2p application they had clear distinction in technology. Today it’s too late to become hulu-clone.
How Joost is different from Hulu now ? Worse content and crаppier web-site ? As p2p application they had clear distinction in technology. Today it’s too late to become hulu-clone.
Wow… for a $45MM investment they better make something happen!
Change Your Home Page
Hold on, if one is to understand these comments correctly – Joost took $45M and launched a crappy website loaded with a lot of amatuerish UX and UI mistakes? Wow, investors must be pissed! Who’s is in charge there?
I am really suprised that someone is spending 45mill on a website that is gonna be nothing more than a youtube clone . Their are so many other websites that people can watch videos on.
joost had a flawed concept from day 1. they’d have been better off with no money and bootstrapping it so they’d have to make a business and not what they made which is dead man walking
p.s. didn’t techcrunch hype joost as a big thing when it first launched?
michael arrington touted joost as the “TV replacement” here:
http://www.tech...venice-project/
michael, did you cancel your cable tv yet in favor of joost?