What is on tonight? Not Joost.com
Written on January 9, 2008 – 9:00 am
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Michael Volpi must either have a great plan for innovation this year, or he must be feeling like the walls are closing in.
Joost started the race for Internet TV way before everyone else with a product unlike any other, with the promise of unprecedented flexibility on targeted ads so the advertisers would get the best bang for their buck.
However it seems like way too many people have jumped on the Internet TV space, with many different and innovative approaches.
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. Of course this was in front of hundreds of people and he just gave me a politically correct answer and went on.
If I could have a chance to talk to Michael Volpi, I’d suggest a couple of crazy ideas, which have been implemented during the past week by no other than Microsoft, Veoh.com, and the Big G.
Microsoft and Veoh started embedding Hulu.com’s content on their video websites. It seems to me that Joost, being a XULRunner application, can do anything a web page can do, including the embedding of flash players such as Hulu’s.
Hulu might be their #1 competitor, and it seems to me that they got the best content of all the video websites, and they can offer it at no cost to the end viewer (ad sponsored). 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. Instead you go to Hulu.com and you find things organized by Show, not channels. (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.
It’s a tough world getting the content, and I think Joost should start making some headlines soon, they must be running out of funding, after all it was only like 40 million they got last year, and rumors say they have over 100 people between New York and Europe, add to that bandwidth and operational costs and the money leaks.
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.
As if all this wasn’t enough, then you have Microsoft with the Xbox already on the living rooms implementing IPTV of their own, and with another device, totaling a significant potential 10 million subscribers, and Panasonic announcing the development of a new TV that will allow you to watch Internet Video provided by Google (YouTube)
The company isn’t mine and I feel stressed about it, I hope they have a good plan, right now the content they have does not compel me to close whatever I’m doing to start watching in full screen or even with a tiny window anything. 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! but you need to get on the living room, the content you have is not worth switching all my working tasks to watch Joost for over 10 minutes, and that way you won’t get me to see any ads. 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.
This is a guest post by Gubatron, Lead Developer of FrostWire.
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By Gijsbregt on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
Settopboxes are a fight of the past. It takes 2-3 years building one and by then all the (better) TV’s will stream IP-content as well.
Besides: which consumer is going to buy all the settopboxes and gameconsoles needed to get the content which is already on TV and can be taped with a DVR.
The future is a meta-EPG/videoplayer, which will be internet based. Veoh.com has the best papers as we speak. Google will be strong (as always(, but a next level EPG is necessary to merge the convenience of the TV with the abundance of the internet.
By Jack on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
“..Joost should start making some headlines soon..”
They’ve made plenty of headlines, but it’s pretty much all been hot air and hype. If they did as good a job delivering their core service as the PR company have done delivering their service, then Joost’ll walk it.
By Mark Cheverton on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
If Joost want to get their content onto the TV, then set-top is not the way to go. As is said above the lead time and rapid obsolescence of the hardware is difficult to manage unless you’re a big service.
Practically all they have to do is setup Joost as a upnp server. The xbox 360 can act as a upnp media renderer and your content can be streamed over your home network from your tv to this or any other upnp renderer such as windows media center.
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
I don’t agree that a Settop box takes too long to develop. Consider the Apple TV. It is JUST a computer in an attractive box that connects to the web.
By Gijsbregt on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
@boris
And Apple TV is a hugh success?
Clearly, it is not “just” that.
By Rutger van Waveren on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
I think it’s about 2 things: distribution and content (especially how it’s organized and personalized). Both are walled gardens right now. If Joost opens up they will survive.
A hardware device could be a solution, but getting into the browser is more important at this time.
I very much agree with you on the channel paradigm Joost is stuck in. It is not about channels! Unbundle the channels. This is old fashioned push media. You would think that Joost - as digital natives - would understand.
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
No Gijsbregt, AppleTv is huge failure. But not because it took them three years to develop but because it has limited features. Something that can be fixed with software. Which is where could Joost come in.
By gijsbregt on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
@ Rutger
I agree fully: channels are of the past. Since linear (even analogue) television will be around for a while, it is better not to try to compete with that (i.e. channeled thinking). So to make a difference it takes a revolution not an evolution. The ipodisation of TV, so to speak.
@ Boris
I spoke the CTO of Joost in December (van Gulik), he stated that it took 2-3 years: from an idea, through a whitelabel Taipei producer, through Philips development & production to the shopfloor.
Personally I think the timing argument is less important than the walled garden argument. No one will buy more than one settopbox, so they better be universal. The best solution of course being a TV with an internetplug next to the “normal” cable plug.