Joost 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.
Indie music and film site OurStage has announced a new content partnership with Joost that will see user picked content offered to Joost users.
Under the deal, OurStage will offer four channels on Joost: Best of OurStage Shorts, Best of OurStage Comedy, OurStage Music Videos and OurStage Artist Access. The channels will give Joost users access to 10 OurStage Artists on each channel and exclusive content including music festival coverage & advice from established musicians & filmmakers.
OurStage launched in March 2007 and lets users rank and buy Inide songs and video. Artists upload their content, which users then judge - two snippets are heard/ watched and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result are constantly updated in to top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and prizes are given to the top artists each month.
See our November 2007 review of their iPhone offering here.
Version 1.0 of the open-source video player Miro was released earlier today. The non-profit company behind Miro has billed its new product not only as a Joost competitor but a purer one at that.
You can check out all of Miro’s perceived advantages here, but to sum them up: Miro is open-sourced, DRM-free, friendly to all content creators, connected to all the popular video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv, high definition, full of content, and BitTorrent-enabled. Joost, on the other hand, is proprietary, exclusive towards content creators, DRM-protected, closed to video sharing sites, lacking in content, lower quality, and entirely streaming video.
I’ve tried both Miro and Joost, and I like them both but for different reasons. Miro functions more like iTunes and is a good way to download batches of interesting videos from the internet regardless of whether they are professionally-produced or user-generated. Content must be downloaded via HTTP or BitTorrent, not streamed (although Miro can convert streams into downloads from sites like YouTube, blip.tv, and DailyMotion). You can download particular shows or just tell it to give you videos from particular categories (comedy, news, technology, etc.). Since videos must be downloaded, playback is not instant; but the videos load pretty quickly so it’s not a huge drawback.
Joost, at least on the surface, is better for viewing professionally-produced content instantly. Since Miro claims to match Joost’s number of commercial channels, however, this may be due simply to how Joost focuses exclusively on professionally-produced content. When you use Miro, you must wade through content not produced by major media outlets to find regular TV shows. And then when you find them, you’ll have to wait until many videos load via BitTorrent. Download speeds will then vary depending on how many people have the seeded the BitTorrent videos.
Miro will soon be available for co-branding so that content creators can create their own versions of the player with pre-configured channels filled with their own content.
New online video startup Joost may have been somewhat overshadowed by Hulu news the last month or so, but that doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared entirely.
Tonight they’ve announced a very cool new feature to the service - instant messaging, via Meebo. Integration for now is via Joost widgets. Over time the feature will likely transitioned into a more direct integration.
Joost is starting to play the numbers game, claiming 15,000 shows and 250 channels. Depth is great and all, but what users really want to see is the good stuff. That’s where Hulu, despite its faults, has a big stronghold. Joost needs to have the compelling content, not just the long tail.
Skinkers, the UK company that is building a P2P live TV platform with Microsoft, has taken $16 million Series B in a round led by Acacia Capital Partners that included original investors Spark Ventures and the Skinkers Management team.
Skinkers will use the funding to further develop and enhance their Live Notification Platform technology and bring to market LiveStation, their live P2P television platform.
Skinners LiveStation product is built on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform and offers a multi-channel live TV platform that will provide existing TV channels both for free and on a paid basis; think cable TV, but on a computer. Competitors include Zattoo, that already offers an existing P2P live platform that provides limited access within Europe. See our previous Zattoo review here.
The P2P live television market competes directly with on-demand providers such as Joost. See our review of Live P2P TV companies here.
Joost CEO Mike Volpi just suggested on stage at Web 2.0 that Joost is working on a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer Internet TV service. “At some point, when we can deliver the quality that Joost is known for, we will deliver an in-browser experience,” he told the audience here. I got up and asked him if he faces any legacy issues, since Joost is based on a peer-to-peer client that must currently be downloaded. His answer was that it is possible to separate the file-sharing from the viewing experience and that in fact Joost is working on just such a browser-based solution. It’s not clear whether people would still need to download a separate piece of software to do the P2P file-streaming or whether that could just be a browser plug-in. But with in-browser Flash video about to get a whole lot better over the next few months, Joost will have to respond with its own browser-based experience.
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. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA. But the real threat to Joost will be coming from Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash player.
Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds. That means YouTube videos will look twice as good—and those will likely remain on the low end in quality.
Every video site on the Web (and quite a few that are still in stealth) is just waiting for Flash Player 9 to be distributed widely and become the new standard. That will allow them to launch their own full-screen Internet TV services with video streams that are just as good or better than Joost’s, and that will require nothing more than a regular browser to watch.
Joost’s greatest asset right now is not its peer-to-peer technology. It’s the momentum it’s gained so far by being an early mover. When Joost finally came out of its private beta on October 1, it had already signed up one million beta users and seeded its network with 15,000 shows. But 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.
As compression technologies get better, video sites will be able to dial up the quality of the video streams. 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. That’s why H.264 is so important. It will change the economics of streaming.
Joost’s only remaining competitive barrier will be its network of viewers and their interactions among each other, along with the third-party apps built around it. If viewers feel that the experience of watching videos on Joost is more social or pleasurable than watching streams by themselves on the Web, maybe they’ll stick around. But social features are not exclusive to Joost, and neither are its platform ambitions. The slam-dunk days for Joost will soon be over.
Israeli-startup AniBoom just went live with an animation channel on Joost to launch, the peer-to-peer Internet TV service. AniBoom is an animation site with 30,000 videos, contributed from about 3,000 animators around the world. AniBoom, which competes with MyToons, currently splits advertising revenues with animators who contribute to the site, and holds an annual $50,000 contest to attract the best animations. Now the best of those will be featured on the Joost channel as well (with ad revenues being split three ways amongst AniBoom, Joost, and the animators).
Here’s an oddly disturbing, yet captivating, AniBoom short called Bendito Machine:
This past July we reported that Joost, a company that has been working for two years to provide quality on-demand IPTV, would launch by the end of this year.
Today, the company announces the availability of public Beta 1.0 on its blog. This would be a bigger deal if Joost had not already signed up over one million private beta users, 10,000 of which came directly from TechCrunch.
If you haven’t checked Joost out yet, head over there to see what all the fuss is about. You can find our previous coverage of the company (and its competitors) here.
The Joost look and feel is being widely copied by others, even before the company officially launches.
Last week the second Joost look-alike popped up: DNAStream. Like the first Joost clone, created by Paul Yanez, it basically appropriates the Joost look and feel and presents it in a web browser through a Flash interface (Joost itself is available only as a download). Unlike Yanez’s version, DNAStream is presenting itself as a business and doesn’t talk about Joost at all. DNAStream is shown above on the right, next to Joost.
These copycats put Joost in a difficult position. The last thing they want to do is end up in a legal tangle. Most startups shy away from litigation anyway, but Joost may want to avoid lawsuits even more than usual - Founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have gone through litigation hell because of Kazaa, the P2P file sharing service they created before Skype.
Will Joost eventually take steps to shut down copycat sites? DNAStream is probably just different enough to avoid a lawsuit (although there is lots of infringing content on the site that will catch the eye of copyright holders). Yanez’s site, which is a duplicate look and feel to Joost and clearly violates Joost trademarks as well as copyrights, remains up after being live for over a month (and he’s also created Babelgum and AppleTV look-alikes). Given the very positive reception it has received from bloggers and others, Joost may want to find a quiet way to eventually shut it down.
Joost 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.
