Joost becomes a white label video service ensuring its death
Formerly one of the most talked about video startups, Joost has decided to become a white label video hosting service, pretty much ensuring its eventual death.
Joost arrived on the video streaming with a lot of fanfare. Not so much for what it was going to do, but more for the fact it was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the men who founded KaZaA and Skype. The two gentlemen were fresh off of their multi-billion dollar sale of Skype to eBay, so everyone felt these men had the Midas touch when it came to Web service launches. Sadly it seems Joost will be the first checkmark on their checklist of services to go under the “failure” column.
The idea was that Joost would be an Internet TV site that you could watch any number of programs on via a desktop client. As Mr. Zennström and Mr. Friis has already had so much success with peer-to-peer technology, they had decided this would also be what powered their latest venture. Everyone who was running the Joost client would be helping each other out with bandwidth distribution, which in turn would greatly cut the costs to the company over trying to stream everything from its own servers. The service entered into Beta testing in late 2007.
In March 2008, Hulu arrived on the video streaming scene and was an instant success. Users loved the easy-to-browse Web site and the ability to watch the videos any time they wanted right inside the web browser really seemed to be a smashing success. While Joost continued to struggle to gain acceptance, Hulu had praise heaped upon it by users and critics alike. By Dec 2008, Joost decided to end the use of the desktop client and announced that it would be moving to a new web site streaming format. Even this decision didn’t help with traffic as you can see in the graph below from Compete.com. (Hulu in blue, Joost in green)
Joost was also suffering from constant criticism over its content selection as being old and stale. While it did have an ever growing library, and was adding new content, it did seem to have an odd fascination with adding numerous classic cartoons such as Transformers and He-Man. While Hulu was bringing out television episodes within a day or two of the original airing, Joost just continued to add old programming that had a fairly limited audience.
While Joost did attempt to garner some more users by releasing an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Bringing us up to now, Joost has announced that it will be turning in to a white label video platform for other companies to use its technology. While there is no direct mention of the termination of its current video streaming operations, it seems implied that this will happen. Unfortunately this does probably spell the end of Joost as there are so many white label solutions out there already, and it just feels like a half-hearted attempt to keep the company operating in some capacity.
Only time will tell if this is truly the end of the line for the company, but it sure feels like it.
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