Why Joost’s software failed - and why the site won’t do better.
24 September, 2008
Internet geeks like fashion too. It’s just not about clothes, but about technology. Joost was really in fashion 18 months ago, when they launched a flashy full-screen video program that you had to download to see their “Internet TV” shows. Distribution would be helped by the peer-to-peer exchange of video data between users, theoretically offering great viewing quality. There would be social stuff. Almost everyone loved it and there was a run on beta invitations.
But a year later, people were being layed off as a new ex-Cisco hotshot was flown in to lead the company. He focused on getting the technical side of the Joost platform right, and hired more engineers. I’ll show you why that was wrong in a second. The result of the extra engineering effort? This month Joost abandoned its proprietary P2P application in favour of delivering video in the browser. The new Joost is a slick social website with video content. Almost exactly like 2 succesfull efforts that came to market well after Joost; The BBC iPlayer in the UK and the brilliant Hulu in the US. Joost will use on its own browser “plug-in” to leverage it’s expensive P2P technology, resulting in the biggest browser plug-in I have ever seen at a whopping 18MB.
Awful content
The issue is, the Kazaa Cowboys are technical guys at heart. Yes the service was buggy from the start, but it was technically revolutionairy at the time (Full screen video was still something special back then, and the p2p and social elements were new to large scale video distribution). However the content was awful, consisting mainly of anonymous rally car races, some old episodes of M*A*S*H and three-year-old reruns of The World’s Strongest Man. The kind of stuff your local broadcaster usually programs at timeslots offered mainly to soft-erotic advertisers. The only positive exception was an Italian video with the 50 best goals of Marco van Basten, which I heartily recommend if it’s still available on the service.
Focus
Of course, Joost tried to get movie studios and European broadcasters and production houses to let it distribute their quality programming. However, there is no reason to give expensively-produced content to a distrubution network with technical issues and no reach in viewers. So, after failing to acquire any interesting content in Europe, Joost moved to the US earlier this year, claiming that it still had a worldwide strategy but obviously focusing on America.
The new site
Yes the new website is flashy, and it has cool features, but I it won’t do any better. Software, website, there still is no compelling content. If you want to be succesfull in video you need to have either a big audience, or a great collection of content. If you have one, you can probably get the other. Yes, the creators of Joost are the guys that built Kazaa and Skype - great, successful tools, but there the content was provided by the users. That model worked. In a publishing environment however, if all you have is technology, that just won’t cut it. Even if the technology would have been bleeding edge, highly social and bug-free, which it still isn’t.
So…
The only way for Joost to survive is to hope that one of the large content owners that doesn’t have it’s own distribution platform yet will buy it. And there aren’t too many of those around anymore…
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Viacom is a Investor in Joost and they provide content from CBS ,MTV Comedy Central and Nickelodeon .
Comment by Matt — Sep 24, 2008 @ 13:15
Nice article Jeroen. Too bad they didn’t make it. They were off to a good start (marketing wise), but the lack of appealing content just killed them. Added to that the success of You Tube and the fact that in-browser distribution allows for a far beter growth rate and there is the scenario for their failure.
What I do not understand, is that given the founder’s background, they didn’t resolve to their former Kazaa tactics: open up the platform for all the sweet illegal stuff. That would have boosted their popularity with the users at least. I guess the way Joost was set up didn’t allow for that scenario. Which is the most costly mistake they made in my opinion.
Comment by Gilbert den Hertog — Sep 24, 2008 @ 22:46
Matt, I agree that there is some fairly good content on the service and the Viacom connection obviously helps them, but most of the Viacom stuff is from MTV, Comedycentral and Nick. Those are niche stations. I don’t see that much recent CBS blockbuster shows. If Joost really wants to present itself as “Internet TV”, it will have to do better…
Comment by Jeroen Verkroost — Sep 25, 2008 @ 21:14
Funny, I almost forgot about Joost while I even had a job interview over there about 16 months ago.
I think Joost has an excellent piece of technology and probably a great team of engineers. I however completely agree with Gilbert here. I believe that their approach failed because they didn’t want to open up their platform. They we’re too much involved with DRM and other activities to keep their platform closed and ’safe’ for content owners. In my opinion, that was the main cause of the lack of interesting content.
The new website looks nice, I like the intro movie but to be honest I don’t think this will be a serious competitor for youtube, iPlayer etc. Missed chance, that is.
Comment by Jochem Prins — Sep 29, 2008 @ 23:00
Good article. Content is everything and in this case hulu wins. There site is a freaking mess, clean yes and eventually you can find what you want but the organization must be done by people with no idea of how to organize content. Even though hulu doesn’t follow a lot of good design principles to find content, they still have the content so…
Comment by kcdrummer — Jan 19, 2009 @ 05:02