With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.

Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum.

It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash - until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.

File-sharing service VIPeers has released an upgraded version of it’s peer-to-peer media discovery and sharing tool PUMP, as reported on TechCrunch France. PUMP is touted as the “iTunes for video”, but it’s exactly much more than that and rather similar to apps like Miro and Joost. Update: and Vuze.

Update: forgot to mention that you need an invite code to download the software for now. Fortunately, we get to give away no less than 15,000 for TechCrunch readers. Code: PUMP-TECHCRUNCH-USA-15000.

PUMP is a desktop application that lets you search for and download the Flash versions of videos from a variety of services, including YouTube, Dailymotion, BitTorrent search engine Mininova, Jamendo, LegalTorrents and Google Torrent, and the results are presented in orderly tabs.

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 feed, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious.

Miro, an open-source HD video player we wrote about in 2007, launched Miro 2.0, an updated, re-designed, more powerful video player.

Several new features have been added to spruce up Miro, including faster performance and torrent downloads, the ability to stream shows from websites like Hulu and YouTube on the sidebar,and the ability to play videos in a separate video. Similar to the 1.0 version, Miro allows users to search for and download video podcasts from sources but Miro is offering a greater selection of video podcasts for users. Miro, a BitTorrent-enabled, Firefox-like open-source application was built by non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation and boasts of more than 4 million downloads in 2008.

In October we wrote “Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?” It turns out that yes, it appears that they are.

A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.

Joost’s two year old online video service was a pretty darned smart idea when it first launched.

Instead of streaming video through the Joost website, users would download a Mozilla-based client and watch it there instead. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. And more importantly, the Joost client had built in person-to-person file sharing. That meant Joost had lower bandwidth bills. It also meant that Joost didn’t need to worry about overloading servers while showing live events - users would just grab the stream from others automatically.

But Joost bet wrong, as the whole world, led by YouTube and then Hulu, got comfortable with Flash as the delivery method for video. Showing video on Flash meant users could deep link to specific videos, and also embed stuff they liked on their own sites. With the benefit of hindsight it all seems sort of obvious.

Joost launched their iPhone application on the App Store this evening, giving users access to 46,000 Joost videos, including major television shows and films. The iPhone has a built in YouTube application already, giving them a serious head start when it comes to video on the iPhone. But archrival Hulu doesn’t yet - giving Joost a little room to maneuver for now.

I’m sure it’s a temporary issue, but the application just doesn’t work yet. I tried to play multiple videos, including the full length version of Men In Black, but an error message reads “The connection to the server was lost. This may be because of poor network quality. Please try again later.” Meanwhile, YouTube videos are playing promptly.

Still, when the app settles down and works properly, it will be a nice addition to the iPhone. Lots of great shows to watch while wiling away the hours on a plane. At least until the battery runs out.

We’ve received a couple of anonymous tips that DirectTV, a $24 billion satellite TV provider, may be entering the online TV wars with a new site called DirectTV Web On Demand. The site would compete with startups like Hulu, Joost, Fancast, Sling.com, etc.

We don’t know much about the service, or even if it’s real. One of the tipsters says they’ve worked on the project and supplied us with the mockup screen shot above, which could quite possibly be real. On the other hand, we’ve spoken with industry insiders and they say they’ve heard nothing about the project.

The screen shot shows Heroes, which is an NBC show. The only way for Fox and NBC shows to be syndicated on the web is via a deal with Hulu. For CBS shows, they have to go through the CBS Audience Network.

That means it’s either very, very early in the development process or it doesn’t exist at all. We have an email in to DirectTV for comment.

Without much fanfare, Joost has finally turned on the browser version of its Web video service, as we noted it would last month. The new site is all based on Flash, and lets you watch old Bruce Lee flicks, Sci-Fi movies like The Fifth Element, and clips from Barely Political and Comedy Central.

The Flash site comes almost exactly a year after I wrote a post pointing out that Joost’s peer-to-peer software approach would not work and that it would have to switch over to Flash-based video, just like every other Web video service. People don’t want to have to launch a new piece of software to watch video on their computers. They want to watch it in their browsers (so they can quickly surf to another page when they realize how much the video they are watching sucks—or, if it doesn’t suck, quickly switch tabs when the boss walks by their desk).

It took Joost a year, but it has finally realized that the Web is where it’s at. Now all it has to do is compete with Hulu, YouTube, Veoh, DailyMotion, and the hundred other video sites out there.

There’s no way Hulu is going to let Joost get a foothold in the race for attention in online professionally produced video.

So what happens when Joost ditches the download, goes all browser and launches a social network around their content?

Hulu can do that. No problem.

Tonight, via a 1 am press release, Hulu launches: show recommendations, user discussion forums for programs and specific episodes, enhanced search and better queue management. They also launched seventeen topical channels, including Anime, Fashion and Beauty, Food and Leisure, Home and Garden, Comedy, Music, Video Games, etc. The company say they now have nearly 900 TV and film titles from over 100 content providers.

And while I still think Joost’s Hot/LOL/Puke/WOW/WTF call out feature is just awesome, Hulu has the Daily Show. So they win.

The new browser-based Joost, which we wrote about two weeks ago (screen shots here), launches this morning. The new Joost still requires a plug-in to facilitate P2P transfers of files (reducing Joost’s bandwidth costs and making high-demand live performances feasible).

There are lots of new community features in the new Joost, which we outlined in our previous post. Joost isn’t just moving to a browser format. They’re also creating a video based social network complete with Facebook-style activity streams that shows you friends what content you are watching, commenting on and “shouting.” See the video below:

So much for Joost’s carefully prepared plans to release a browser version of their TV over IP service later this month. News leaked this morning that Joost would be abandoning their year old XUL based desktop client in favor of a browser based service that’s more like Hulu and YouTube. Users will still be required to download a plugin that facilitates P2P transfers of files, which is still an adoption hurdle. But at least users can watch videos directly in their browser.

The new site, which is password protected, is at new.joost.com. We’ve obtained screen shots of the service:

Joost, battling for relevance in the online tv world against Hulu and others, will soon no longer require users to download separate desktop software to access the service (its existing software is based on Xul). Instead users will be able to access Joost via a small browser plugin that will continue to use Joost’s P2P technology to distribute video among users quickly.

The service launched to considerable fanfare but has fallen off the radar as of late as the company has been plagued by a shortage of content and, well, users. And as the inertia of the online video business moves away from desktop clients and to the Web, it seems Joost has finally seen the writing on the wall and will launch an online video service of its own.