Joost in Time TV

We have reported before on the new breed to TV services spearheaded by Joost from that innovative team that first created Kazaa and Skype. Joost and a rival, Babelgum, a site backed by the Italian telecommunications magnate Silvio Scaglia are both currently under beta and the initial experience is amazing.

Both sites require a quick download to get started and a continuous Internet connection.
The main difference between these sites and YouTube is that the content is full-length and professionally edited. YouTube and MySpace only give you short videos with consumers on average only visiting YouTube for 11.5 minutes at a time.
Advertising rules. Joost requires you to register our age, gender and other details, and both Web sites say they will monitor your viewing patterns. Joost has already signed up more than 30 major advertisers and within a few minutes of logging on to Joost, ads will appear.

The service is multi dimensional and enables you to chat online as you watch TV – true multi tasking! Well maybe, if you are by yourself. It is very easy to see it taking off in the US where the TV is never off and the sound bite a way of life.

BT Vision this week starts to promote its new broadband services in the UK. They are backed by Microsoft and Phillips and are focused at pushing broadband boundaries TV, demand services and much more through their free set boxes and integration services.
We are certainly entering a new era of television and what will that mean to how we socialise, communicate, access on demand services? Ultimately will broadband provide all home services and wi-fi all mobile ones? What will that mean re the devices that will prevail?

We are not only witnessing the convergence of delivery technology but also of content itself and this presents one dimensional publishers with some interesting challenges!

Kazza, Skype and now Joost

There are two people who more than most helped shape the Internet ‘free’ world we live in today. It was definitely not Jobs and Gates or those Google guys Page and Brin nor Napster’s Parker and Fanning but Niklas Zennstrom (pictured)and Janus Friis. This Scandinavian team not only gave us Kazza and arguably the second generation of P2P music but went on to create Skype and redefine how we all communicated. Now they have appeared again with their latest venture ‘Joost’.

But this time they are not pushing the legal boundaries but doing everything by the book. Revenue-sharing agreements have been signed and licenses have been granted.

Today Friis and Zennstrom work out of Skype’s offices in London. Although they sold Skype for $2.6billion to eBay in 2005, they remain active in the company.
Joost has struck a major deal with Viacom which gives Viacom a degree of control over its programming that it has not enjoyed from the likes of YouTube and also a platform they claim is piracy-proof. Only this month , Viacom demanded that YouTube, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming due to the lack of licensing and revenue sharing agreements.

Joost replicates channel swapping television, streaming full-length programs in full-screen format and allowing users to flip through channels that offer everything from documentary news programs to videos.

Technology convergence between the various video, TV and visual platforms is certainly coming fast but because is built with this in mind it could present the ‘tipping point’ that changes how consumers watch TV and videos on the Web in the same way the Skype redefined voice over internet.

Certainly one to watch!