www.dpingram.com

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.

“The companies are expected to announce this week an unprecedented arrangement in which the Viacom-owned channel will premiere the entire season of its new scripted comedy series “I Hate My 30s” exclusively on the upstart Internet TV service on July 16 - 10 days ahead of the series’ broadcast premiere.”

“Viacom is an investor in Joost, having joined the likes of CBS Corp., Sequoia Capital, the Li Ka-Shing Foundation and Index Ventures in a $45 million round of funding announced in May. Joost announced an overall content partnership with Viacom in February, getting programming from MTV, BET, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures.”

source is here

This article from Mashable (original article)

MySpace to Exclusively Stream Rip Curl Shows
April 24, 2007 — 05:12 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole, Mashable
MySpace has just announced an agreement with Rip Curl, a company dedicated to products and events surrounding action board sports.

With the exclusive partnership, Rip Curl content will be broadcast and promoted on MySpace. Rip Curl Search TV shows, their International Films back catalog, and streaming and event video productions from Rip Curl contests will show on MySpace and their own website. As both companies have a global audience, the deal is beneficial for all parties involved. Rip Curl reaches a broader audience, and MySpace ramps up their online video offerings, moving beyond the realm of user-generated content to more premium offerings.

The deal signifies the onset of a new video strategy for MySpace, which is important as they play catch-up to YouTube, who has landed several deals with broadcast networks, and Joost, who has recently signed deals with several players in the indie film market.

The Wall Street Journal (in this story) reports on a recent deal between Viacom and Joost, announced just weeks after Viacom ordered YouTube to pull all its content under threat of legal action.

A lot of news agencies and bloggers are getting a bit confused between Joost and YouTube thinking they are essentially the same sort of thing. Far from it, see my previous post here.

Even the WSJ article seems to be written from the viewpoint that YouTube and Joost are comparable services. They are not.

Joost is now on Intel Macs, says the Joost blog here.

With all the news and hype around Joost I thought I’d add some balance by mentioning Veoh.

Veoh, like Joost is a peer-to-peer video network that allows content owners to create channels for distributing full-screen, high quality video.

While Joost has been in closed beta Veoh has been out there for a while:

With P2P seeming to be gaining a bigger and bigger slice of attention, I keep wondering what the next P2P applictaion will be.

Like a lot of people I first came across P2P apps with file sharing like Napster and the like. Next i heard it spoken about in enterprise computing discussions, particularly in relation to a supply chain management product i was working on at the time (the guy who was talking about it then was John Ball), but back then I found it hard to grasp how P2P could be turned to anything more than the file sharing apps. How could a P2P platform be used for more than file sharing and actually be used to provide an enterprise computing platform for a set of business process applications? Now, I hear its called grid computing or various other names, Dion Hinchcliffe writes a lot on this subject.

So whats the next applictaion of P2P? Lots of news is out there about Joost (PKA The Venice Project), and its ‘effectively’ P2P TV. It was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis the founders of Kazaa and Skype.

So here’s the pattern… Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis develop Kazaa (P2P file sharing, not the fist but nonetheless successful). Next they stay in P2P, and develop Skype (P2P computer telephony, VoIP or Voice over IP). Now they remain in P2P again and develop Joost (effectively P2P TV). See the pattern, its like they sit there and say “right, thats done, now what else can we turn P2P to”.

I have a new one, or rather I think Izimi may have a new one…. P2P Web site publishing. Here it is: At the moment websites get hosted centrally, and then distributed time by time upon demand to browsers that request the site’s pages (content).

Now, i contend isn’t that just like old fashioned media broadcast? OK, its not quite broadcast, but its still server to peer; the content gets centrally gathered, then delivered point to point to the media’s consumer.

With Izimi you could self-publish a website right there on your own computer. When you use Izimi to self-publish the content stays on your machine (no uploading to a hosting company) but its available to any one anywhere on the internet with just their browser via a regular URL (no need for them to have any special client software as you would with most P2P apps). You can do this with Izimi now.

But what happens when you turn your machine off? Hosting companies are useful because they give you resilience and allow your website to stay available even when you turn your computer off. Well, if Izimi were to remove that ‘problem’, is it a real alternative for central hosting? Almost.

The other point is bandwidth. When I am self publishing with Izimi it is my bandwidth that is used to deliver content to people who request it. Well, way back when we started Izimi we already had the multipoint download capability (its pretty standard P2P technique to distribute content to various places to allow co-operative supply of content). In this way a person requesting my content could be serviced by a whole bunch of peers in the network each delivering a fraction of the whole website, and this all happens in the background. So, the question of bandwidth becomes a moot one. P2P has always been good at this, so its nothing new.

SO, whats the point of all this? Simple. Izimi just may prove to be the next revolutionary P2P application, and that is website hosting. Afterall, why use a hosting company when you can do it easily yourself with no negative impact?

Strictly speaking of course you’d have to call it something different to P2P. Afterall its not really P2P (peer to peer) its P2B (peer to browser), and that is a GREAT advantage. It truely means that your content/media/website is available to ANYONE ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET - no need for them to first have downloaded your proprietory client. Imagine is you could use Skype, Kazaa, and Joost without any download. Just think how fast and far it would spread.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the duo that brought the world Skype and Kazaa, have chosen a name for their new online-video start-up (previously called The Venice Project): Joost.

Company executives had referred to the new company for months by the codename “The Venice Project.” They chose Joost because they like the ring of it, according to a spokeswoman. The word doesn’t have any meaning.

The plan, according to Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl, is to offer studios, cable stations and anyone else who wants to distribute high-quality video over the Internet, a fast, efficient and cheap distribution method. To do this, the company will rely on the peer-to-peer technology that helped Friis and Zennstrom build Skype and Kazaa.

Most importantly, Joost has yet to strike any marquee partnerships with top film or TV producers. Without them, their challenge is a tough one: convincing studio executives and the like to turn over their content to Joost when the company has yet to attract a big audience.

BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based distributor of a competing peer-to-peer company is also vying to license technology to Internet video companies. Another threat could come from the growing number of sites that offer top cable and movie channels without permission. One such company, TVU Networks, made a splash last summer by offering soccer fans the ability to watch World Cup matches on their PC. For a while, TVU Networks was offering HBO, CNN, the Disney Channel and NBAtv before many of the companies forced it to pull their shows down.

What Joost has going for it is that the software replicates the TV-viewing experience better than many of the other companies trying to wed TV to the PC. And this is a time when Hollywood is experimenting with the Internet. During the past year, Warner Bros. cut distribution deals with Guba, a little-known video-sharing site, and BitTorrent, a company that many consider to be synonymous with digital piracy.

Joost’s nifty technology may be enough to sway the entertainment industry to place a bet on proven winners in Friis and Zennstrom.

A menu allows users to switch channels with a click of a link. Users will also have TiVo-like control of the content and access to any show offered regardless of time of day. They can also move forward or backward within a show.

The Luxembourg-based company will support itself with advertising, specifically Internet ads that behave just TV commercials.

“These are the kind of ads that the TV industry and viewers understand,” de Wahl said.

OS by Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com, is here

Some Joost screenshots are here

If your ISP has a strict monthly limit on bandwidth usage, you could be forced to turn off the planned peer-to-peer TV streaming service from the founders of the Skype internet telephone service.

The beta video stream service, known as The Venice Project, is a bandwidth blockbuster, consuming an average 320MB of downloaded and 105MB of uploaded traffic for an hour’s worth of TV viewing. The service aims to distribute TV and other video content over the web instead of conventional terrestrial, satellite or cable channels.

The 105MB per hour upload rate is almost equivalent to 256Kbps and in documentation provided to beta testers, The Venice Project team warns that the service “will exhaust a 1GB cap in 10 hours”.

A typical video stream in TV quality consumes about 70GB per hour, a spokeswoman for The Venice Project confirmed. To lower users’ bandwidth requirements, The Venice Project is testing a new compressing technique but nevertheless points out that users will need to ensure that they have an upper limit on their monthly internet usage, according to the spokeswoman.

Many ISPs (Internet service providers) offer broadband connections with no time limitations but provide usage guidelines that seek to control users who regularly exceed agreed monthly data transmission volumes.

Because the service runs on a P2P (peer-to-peer) network, users both host and send TV programmes to other users in the automated system, adding to their usage.

The Venice Project is almost certain to worry the numerous network operators already concerned about their broadband pipes becoming plugged with a range of new video download services. A proliferation of these services could add fuel to the nation’s already overheated debate on network neutrality.

The project is the brainchild of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of the Kazaa P-to-P music exchange and Skype Voip (voice over internet protocol) service.

I think I blogged before about The Venice Project (www.theveniceproject.com) and there are now some screenshots and a details report on the beta version on Om Malik’s blog (see reference at foot of this post).

There are several things I like about TVP, quite apart from the software itself, and they are that these guys have been hugely successful with both Kazaa and SKype, so they know a thing of two about getting a ground-breaking idea to market.

Take a look at the website, plain, simple, no bullshit, and speaks to us in a very natural language. There is a view that i subscribve to that says people/consumers/us are getting desensitized to clever marketing stuff, spin, and heavy branding. Todays cutting edge marketing is simple, clear, humble, plain english, and open. NOtice how they speak openly about the challenges they face and overcome (instead of thinking, “oh shit, we cant tell the people THAT”, they openly discuss the challenges).

They say there is no such thing as “The New Man”, that the New Man is just the Old Man who has learnt that he has to get a bit more in touch with his feminine side if he wants to bed the girls. Now that sounds a bit manipulative, but so be it, if it works, do it. Perhaps, similarly, there is no such thing as The New Marketing, its just the Old Marketing that has realised it has to ’show itself’ as being more low-tech and less ‘marketing’ to cut through.

I say if thats what TVP is doing then fair play to them. At the end of the day, if you want to be in business you have to be a mercenary bastard, and why not. Just that these days you have to also be a bit more open if you want to win the herats and minds of the cynical consumers, like us.

Anyway, review of TVP and screenshots are here