Will Joost Die?
January 8, 2008
I am publishing a summary of a gubatron blog post. It make for an interesting read as there is not much going on in the news about Joost at this point… so enjoy:
Source: http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2008/01/07/will-joost-die/
During the last weeks, I’ve started noticing how some big players are merging with Hulu.com’s embeddable content and how some of them are trying to get into your living room.
Last year I told David Clark, North American VP of Joost at the NY Video Meetup that many people have said that Joost should create a Set-Top Box device, or to partner up with a TV manufacturer and get Joost on the TV, but probably one of the things they’ve not thought about is to port Joost into an Xbox Live downloadable application and make a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft and Veoh started embedding Hulu.com’s content on their video websites. If I were Volpi, I’d take a crazy chance and start a new line up of Hulu based channels. There’s no way to get around the commercial insertion points that Hulu will show, but at least he would keep the audience within the application, giving him more P2P uptime to share content, and at the same time he could even overlay some ads on top of that content.
It sucks that there’s nothing really worth watching in Joost and if there is, it’s a pain in the ass to discover the good stuff. (Joost should have a way to browse content by show, season, episodes, not like 100 CBS channels with the same logo). In Hulu you’ll find the stuff everyone is watching, Heroes, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and the list goes on.
So they’ve not made their content embeddable, probably cause they haven’t made up their minds on whether to be real imaginative on how to implement P2P on the flash player, or to create their own browser plugin (which should be included when you download the client now, so that you can start creating momentum, but would turn probably into another Real Player, vs Quicktime, vs Media Player pain in the ass), or to bite the bullet and start distributing both embeddable (Flash Player based) and Joost P2P content.
If anything I’ll gladly watch Joost on my living room, but it needs to be convenient.
Volpi, come up with a Joost Branded TV, A Set-Top-Box, A wireless streaming device, something! In the meantime get us some good content, get us South Park you already got Comedy Central, beg some more and get South Park, get HBO, put Hulu content in it, make Joost the symbol of watching TV on the computer or I don’t see Joost for 2009.
Related Posts
Thanks for the trackback.
I just feel a little frustrated with what Joost as a platform could do, and should do. They seemed to be on the top of the innovation wave but they’re falling behind and as an user you see yourself more and more drawn to services that are more convenient and more entertaining.
It’s a tough market I suppose, let’s hope Jan & Friz will do whatever it takes to make all the efforts worth it, it would be sad to see Joost in techcrunch’s dead pool by the end of the year.
I feel your frustration. THe more Joost wait the harder it will get to be successfull with an appliance. Google and Panasonic just announced a partnership where Youtube and Picasa album will be directly available on the TV (as long as you connect the TV to the internet).
If Joost wait too long services like that will take the space Joost could have filled and no one will care for it.
Microsoft is already making major inroads with the XBOX 360 and I am ready to bet that Apple will have something special on the living room front at Macworld 2008.