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Joost is suffering as copycat services and alliances between old-media companies are taking a hold on the new generation of TV viewers.

This from the Sunday Times today…

JOOST, the online television service launched with a fanfare last year by the founders of internet telephony firm Skype, is preparing for a major retrenchment after failing to attract enough users and top-flight broadcasting rights.

The company is expected to rein in its global ambitions to focus solely on the US market.

Set up as an antidote to YouTube by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis after they sold Skype to online auctioneer Ebay, Joost has been overshadowed by the success of the BBC’s iPlayer, and in America, Hulu, a collaboration between NBC and News Corporation, the ultimate owner of The Sunday Times.

It has struggled to convince media and sports companies to sell it global rights, which are normally parcelled out to broadcasters country by country.

Joost has also suffered from senior defections. Chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik jumped ship for the BBC earlier in the year.

The company raised £23m last May from backers including CBS, Viacom, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

A spokeswoman insisted most of the cash was still in the bank.

“We are not shedding staff,” she said. “There are some situations where staff have been rea-ligned to better fit our needs.”

Zennstrom told The Sunday Times a year ago: “We want to change the way people watch television . . . liberating people from the programme guide.”

Joost is unlikely to close, however. “There are too many egos involved,” said one former employee.

The BBC iPlayer, which provides a free seven-day window for viewers to watch shows they missed the first time round, is recording up to 500,000 programme downloads a day.

In the summer, it will be joined by Kangaroo, a portal shared by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, to show older content, which will be funded by advertising.

Original article is here.

Metacafe Raises Huge $30 Million Round

The money keeps piling in for some online video sites: Metacafe is announcing a series C round today of $30 million led by new investors Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures. Existing investors Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital also returned for this round. The money will be used to achieve global growth, expand the “breadth” of content available on the site and further develop the Producer Rewards revenue sharing scheme.

from Pete Cashmore at Mashable!

Now here’s a really disruptive idea…

Why should we pay for ANY music??? Maybe it should be free to consumers?

Digital rights management (DRM) is dying, no doubt about it. It was invented by record and film companies who wanted to restrict an amazing new distribution opportunity instead of embrace it. But, as King Canute discovered, you can’t stop an incoming tide, you either find a way to benefit from it or you drown trying to resist it.

There never was any DRM on vinyl or tapes, and people ripped them off left right and centre. What scared the record companies into creating DRM was how much wider the ‘problem’ became with the ease of communication and distribution enabled by the birth of the internet, email, MP3, P2P, etc, etc.

But these days business never stays static, it changes faster than ever and companies, no INDUSTRIES, must be agile enough to respond to the change and not try to prevent it. The companies that embrace the inevitable chance early, run it alongside their existing business perhaps as an experiment, hedge their bets, will win out over the old school – they will outshine them, outpace them, out-innovate them, and outlive them.

So, here is the idea. Music is media content right? It attracts and engages people, it excites people, they live it, they love it, they mould their lives on their stars. For years the music industry has licensed its music content to the media channels, who have been happy to pay for that license in order to offer engaging content via their distribution channel, to a bunch of consumers, in order that they can either charge people to watch it, and/or charge advertisers to place ads between the media. Why can I turn on the radio and listen to a commercial radio station for free? Its because they make their money from the advertisers, not from me.

Now, years back when I was in supply chain management at the birth of e-commerce the buzzword was disintermediation. The new technologies collectively described as e-commerce enabled businesses to move up and down the supply chain much more easly than before, taking a larger piece of the commercial pie, attacking new markets, increasing margins, creating greater efficiencies, and the natural consequence of this was disintermediation in the supply chain – the removal of entire links in the process – business and whole business models died as new ones were invented.

I see similar opportunities. How about a producer doesn’t sell their content to us. How about they give it to us, but make their money from commercial sponsors? That way you can forget DRM, in fact its in the producers’ interest to make it even easier to share the content, not restrict it. The technology exists to track the distribution path or digital media around the web and that paves the way for producers to monetize their content by ‘selling’ those impressions to advertisers. Its what happens with UGC content, blogs, etc. People produce the content and distribute it for free, the payback being the advertising dollars.
Everything changes. I see no reason why we music producers, and most likely other types of professional media content won’t go this way. In the future we won’t pay for music, it will be sponsor-subsidized.

The total number of IPTV households will grow dramatically over the next five years, rising from just under 6 million homes worldwide in 2006 to more than 80 million in 2011, predicts a new report from the technology research firm, Strategy Analytics. The report, “Global IPTV Forecast: Homes, Users and Subscribers,” finds that many “subscribers” to IPTV will not be paying directly for TV programming or services, but will use IPTV free-of-charge as part of a package of bundled broadband services. This report predicts that the number of households worldwide paying for IPTV services will rise from 3.3 million in 2006 to 40.9 million in 2011.

AT&T and Microsoft are sinking over $4bn each into IPTV in an attempt to own the big play. IPTV effectively replaces what cable can do, plus more, over the internet.

Major TV companies are releasing entire episodes of popular series as free video podcasts on iTunes, which makes you wonder if the future of television isn’t something closer to podcasts than broadcast - that is, the ability to subscribe only to specific shows whilst forgetting about the whole concept of a channel. Isnt a channel essentially a hang over from the broadcast mechanism.

Cisco plans to come out a big winner as broadband video explodes, noting that “companies are still grappling with how to generate reliable revenue from content that is largely free and often littered with copyright-infringement land mines.” The obvious profit path is to sell intelligent gear, keeping in mind Cisco’s self-admitted plan to support the incumbent vision of a two-tiered Internet replete with “Tollways.” The other way is by walking up and punching Microsoft and Alcatel in the mouth, as they push closer to the consumer and offer IPTV solutions of their own (having bought Scientific Atlanta, KiSS and Arroyo Networks).

OA is here

Microsoft already provides the software for many telco’s IPTV offerings. Already, AT&T, British Telecom and Deutsche Telecom are using Microsoft’s underlying IPTV software, and Microsoft says 11 other companies are either evaluating the software or running trials.

They also hope to get telcos offering Xbox 360 consoles to consumers as an alternative IPTV receiver and recorder. I can think of a few consumers who would see that as a great attraction!

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said this week at CES, “We started over 10 years ago (on IPTV), so we were completely over-optimistic.”

At CES, Microsoft is demonstrating the features of its IPTV system, including high-definition display, fast channel changing and the ability to preview channels at the bottom of the screen before switching to them.

There’s a lot of noise about watching telly when you want to over the Web but the whole IPTV drive seems to be three parts fluffy marketing to one part actual delivery.

Tiscali is now throwing its few pence worth into the IPTV hat by claiming that most Brits really want IPTV. Of course, that’s those Brits that understand what IPTV stands for, which is not a lot. In a survey to back up its own Homechoice broadband TV offering, 17 per cent said they are already watching on-demand TV, while 63 per expressed their desire to. Many believe traditional programming from broadcasters will have to change or die.

Neal McCleave, managing director of media services for Tiscali UK said:

“There is obviously a big demand already among British consumers for the freedom and choice IPTV will give them, even if they don’t know the jargon yet. Conventional broadcasters should heed the warning and will need to adapt significantly in the coming years to retain their market share.”

That probably explains why the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV are all doing - or about to do - broadband TV then

OA by Martin Lynch is here

Channel Four is to deliver programming through Sony PSP consoles connected to wireless hotspots as a way to target viewers on the move.

Global growth is on track for 50.5 million subscribers by 2010 with revenues topping $12.2 billion

Watching TV in the living room is about to get a whole lot more interesting with the improved experience offered by IPTV slowly becoming a reality in the U.S. If you’re in Europe or Asia, you’re much more likely to be enjoying those benefits now, as those markets are much further along in deployments and subscribers.

Regardless, the worldwide IPTV market is growing at a rapid pace, and telcos and cable operators that don’t overcome the challenges involved in deploying IPTV will soon be left behind.

We believe the global IPTV market will reach approx. 50.5 million subscribers in 2010

said Gary Schultz, principal analyst at Multimedia Research Group. The drive by telcos everywhere to increase their revenue base, plus innovative service provisioning, plus better overall quality of service and user choice will drive the markets. Europe and Asia will still be ahead, with 41 percent and 32 percent share of market (in their respective telco markets). North America should grow to about 23 percent share of market, up from its current level of about 15 percent.

There is much more in this report which is here