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Why Viacom Plus Joost is “Game Changing”

ByNalts

Want to watch shows from MTV, Comedy Central or Spike via broadband? Want to check out Paramount movies? Then you’ll need to switch from YouTube to Joost. No sooner did Viacom order YouTube to pull content, they’ve licensed hundreds of hours of content to Joost, a start-up formed by the founders of Kazaa and Skype (see Wall Street Journal).

This is “game changing” news for many reasons:

  • Joost’s model is about a convergence of online videos and television. We’re on the verge, and this is a big step in that direction.
  • Viacom will likely keep the vast majority of the ad revenue, but this gives Joost credibility and a jump-start for building an audience.
  • It’s arguably an overstatement, but Viacom is for Joost is somewhat like Howard Stern was for Sirius.
  • Now YouTube will need to compete to maintain relationships with “big media.”
  • It’s a bold move for Viacom because they’re basically saying they don’t need an online audience. They can build one. How many people use Joost vs. YouTube?

Folks, my money is on Joost. I think it will be a household name this summer, and will appear to many to have come from nowhere. Except for you faithful readers of WillVideoForFood of course. You’ll know.

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10 Comments

  2. I agree with your prediction.

    Look at Apple and MP3 players – they entered the race very late with the iPod, but created a marketplace by introducing a lot of hype, strong usability, branding AND licensing content…

    …they tried to license video content as well, but apparently weren’t successful enough or there’d be no Joosts.

  3. …….I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Joost….. :s

    However, this is awesome news because Youtube is so annoying me lately. Its to online video, what ‘Bootleg DVD sellers on street corners’ are to Hollywood.

    It cheapens the whole thing, makes creativity and originality worthless. Although I havnt made an effort to get involved in it, I like the Vbloggers that have their own little community on Youtube, and that interact in their own little networks.

    But I don’t like the constant rip offs that get uploaded on there. Almost every video thats on there, is on there multiple times on different peoples accounts.

    I’ll have to go explore this whole ‘Joost’ thing

  7. I’ve beta tested joost, and the problem with it is it takes up a ton of bandwidth –it’s a p2p video application, so while it’s running it’s constantly uploading and downloading as much data as your connection will allow. Which isn’t inherently bad if you have a really fast connection, but all the computers in my house connect to the internet through a wireless router, and 80211g doesn’t have enough bandwidth for it. That means it takes 5-10 seconds to change the channel, and right now I don’t have the patience for that. This won’t matter when there’s a ton of people in your area using it, but right now it’s considerably less satisfying than regular television or Online video.
    Plus if it gets bigger, expect the anti-net-neutrality forces to make a huge stink.

  8. I’ve only got 1 PC on my connection seeing that I’m the only one in my house that actually knows how to use a computer so I guess the connection problem wouldn’t hurt me much. Would be nice to try it out anyway. Thanks for the little mini-review 🙂

  9. My opinion is that Joost is way overrated — especially right now. The whole – invite thing is just a ploy to get more and more people intrigued and keep the hype up. People are starting to beg for invites just like they did for gmail and the like. Eh….I can take it or leave it. Leave it mostly.

    The programming available right now is crap and it’s a huge resource hog. I think it might become hot — but they’ve got some work to do. I hear CBS is/was interested. Cha-ching. But YT competing with Joost – I don’t think so. At least right now.

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