The Latest Joost News

Joost, the Internet file-sharing technology which offers a television-like viewing experience has just struck a deal with JumpTV, a global video carrier which offers “ethnic” television programming. This deal will bring internal television channels to Joost, which was started up by the Skype and Kazaa founders.

JumpTV is a Candadian firm that offers around 270 channels showing TV programs from 70 countries including Bahrain, Albania, Pakistan and Korea on a subscription and free basis. Basically, JumpTV buys the rights to all these shows and broadcasts the material over the Internet for no cost at all.

Obviously, the target audience would be expatriates and ethnic audiences interested in watching TV from their homelands. According to JumpTV CEO, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, his company would continue to show streaming video on its own Web network, but will use Joost as well to get their channels out to a broader audience.”

Joost, which is still in beta-test mode, will benefit from this deal. JumpTV will launch on Joost initially with Spanish-language series from Columbia, Peru and Chile, and an Arabic-language comedy. Channels in other languages from JumpTV, including Romanian, Turkish, Russian and Bengali are slated to be launched on Joost in the near future.

The news that online TV platform Joost will be adding more programs to its growing inventory of TV shows with international YV program distributor JumpTV has surely had the media buzzing with speculation of its growing threat to YouTube.

However, one key difference with Joost is that it will uses peer-to-peer delivery methods to ensure high-quality, long-form, episodic content rather than the YouTube-style clips. More...


joost

Joost - will it work?

by engadget.com
Chances are that anyone remotely in the loop these days would be familiar with "Kazaa" and "Skype," but only time will tell if folks warm up to "Joost."

The duo who founded one of the most popular P2P networks as well as a mainstay in every VoIP conversation are finally naming (and launching) their video distribution service, aiming to "cheaply and efficiently distribute high-quality video over the internet" via the same P2P technology that has treated them so well thus far.

Unfortunately for them, the road from here is quite rocky, especially when you consider the already well-established iTunes Movie Store, YouTube, and the variety of download-to-burn services currently available.

Additionally, Joost has yet to nail down any "marquee partnerships with top film or TV producers," which will almost certainly make gaining marketshare an all but impossible chore. The one thing this rendition has going for it, however, is the general experience in comparison to other alternatives, as reports liken it to a "TiVo-like layout" that gives users next to total control over the content at hand.

The company has stated that it will support itself with internet ads that behave like television commercials, which presumably won't come as any shock to consumers partaking in what Joost has to offer.

Unfortunately, there's no hard details on when the newfound service will go live nor about what content will be served up, but regardless, a little more competition (and a little less dictatorship) in online video distribution is more than welcome. More...



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Joost News

Former Skype Founders Launch IPTV — Call it Joost

The much speculated IPTV service by Skype, previously codenamed 'The Venice Project ' is now officially out of the bag, as 'Joost' (pronounced "Juiced").

The free service will allow viewers to access all kinds of television from across the world, over the Internet.The ad supported site will try to replicate the complete television experience, in full-screen, broadcast quality, along with channel flipping, and interactivity. The service is still undergoing trials, but thousands of people have been invited to download the software on trial.

Joost aims to offer TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of Web 2.0, which enables broadcasters to get their program in front of a global Internet audience. Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl says the team plans 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. He says the company will use the same peer-to-peer technology used in Skype and Kazaa.

The Joost menu allows users to switch channels with the click of a link, TiVo-like control of the content and access to any show, any time of the day. Users may also move forward or backward within a show and skip commercials. There is a line-up of sports, documentaries and music programming, but the team says this is just trial programming and that when the full launch takes place in the next few months, there will be more impressive content on offer.

Founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Joost say Joost fills a critical gap in the online video entertainment arena because it is powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators. The Joost website says, "Joost is a new way to watch TV, free of the schedules and restrictions that come with traditional television."

The site also promises to provide a platform for the 'best television content on the planet' to bring users the shows from TV studios, as well as the specialist programs created by professionals and enthusiasts. The Joost team also reveals that they're working on a native Macintosh Intel version and expect it to be available in the next few months. A Linux version is also in the works. More...

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First Skype|Now Net TV

The founders of the Skype internet telephony service are launching what they describe as the world's first broadcast quality internet TV service.

Following speculation about a service dubbed The Venice Project, the online television software is now being unveiled under the name Joost.

It is designed to enable broadcasters to get their programmes in front of a global internet audience.

It will allow viewers to access all kinds of television over the internet.

Trial period

The chief executive, Frederik de Wahl, showing off the service in Joost's London offices, claimed that it provided a different experience from other internet television ventures.

"We are trying to replicate the complete television experience," he explained as he flicked through channels using the Joost interface on a widescreen television.

"It's full-screen, broadcast quality, you've got instant channel flipping, and interactivity - a viewer can come to us and get all their TV needs."

The service is still undergoing trials, but thousands of people have taken up an invitation to download the software and try it out.

But the big question is what is there to watch?

So far, it is hard to see a compelling reason to switch on to Joost, which will be a free service supported by advertising.

Competitive market

There is a line-up of sports, documentaries and music programming, but nothing that is going to tempt many away from their existing television diet.

But Mr De Wahl insists this is just trial programming and when the full launch takes place in the next few months there will be much more impressive content on offer.

Joost is backed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype, while Frederik de Wahl previously ran a business whose peer-to-peer software was used in Skype.

He says a version of that software is key to the appeal of Joost, with new peer-to-peer technology, backed up by the firm's own servers, making it possible to stream video on demand.

But rival services are already casting doubt on the claim that Joost represents a new frontier for internet television.

BT Vision, launched in December, offers video-on-demand via broadband, and Channel Four Television says its 4OD service promises DVD-quality programmes to download to your computer.

Meanwhile another company calling itself Babelgum contacted the BBC to insist that its service, launching in March, would also use peer-to-peer technology to stream video at "near-TV resolution".

A spokesman said "the Venice Project hasn't got this to itself."

The battle to broadcast over the internet is hotting up and the Venice Project - or Joost as we now must call it - will have to make plenty of noise to make itself heard. More...

Joost News

Joost is pronounced "juiced"

How Joost IPTV Network Will Run
By Kyle Monson

Our fledgling blog, AppScout, got the CEO of fledgling video service Joost, Fredrik de Wahl, on the phone Wednesday. We had a good chat about Joost's delivery system, video quality, and why you won't be able to upload your grainy webcam video of your dorm room to Joost's pristine video service. If you recall, Joost was until yesterday known as the Venice Project, and is geared toward bringing the TV experience to a Web-based platform. Let's jump right into it...
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AppScout: To start off, how do you move the video around? Do you have a CDN, or is it straight peer to peer?

Fredrik de Wahl: We have a hybrid peer-to-peer approach. P2P delivery is great for very popular content--for things that are really challenging when you want to have mass distribution. For less popular content, P2P does not provide the best technical solution.

In these circumstances, a centralized distribution mechanism actually has very few problems and provides the best solution for the end user. So what we have done is taken an approach to this where we have a "long-tail storage system" which is acting as a seeding server for the network. The LTS is the originating point in the system and also the fallback in case for some reason the content does not reside on the P2P network. There's absolutely no way [for the user] to determine how and where the user gets the content from and that's the reason we designed Joost like that--the viewing experience is all about getting the content in full-screen, high-resolution, and the technology is acting in the background. The viewer of Joost just gets an extraordinary viewing experience from the technology.

If it's P2P, where does the content actually live on a user's machine?

It's not only a P2P network, it's P2P streaming. Everything is delivered to the end user or the viewer in bits and bytes which are a proprietary standard, and each packet is encrypted. Different packets are then cached after being viewed on your machine much like cached Web content from your Web browser, with the difference being that we then pass it on to others when they want to watch it.

Everything originates from the long-tail storage server in Luxembourg, and then if the content is also available in caches, the caches will start to chip in. When there's enough content in the different caches, you can stream everything just from the peers.

Are these Long-Tail Stations like Skype's "supernode" architecture? Does Joost own them or are they users? More...

Who are the Joost Guys

Skype creators are Joost
TOBY STERLING
Associated Press

AMSTERDAM — The co-founders of the Internet telephone service Skype unveiled the brand name and details of their latest project Tuesday: an Internet-based television service called Joost.

Entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype for US$2.6 billion to EBay Inc. in 2005, said the new project combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television.

Joost — pronounced “juiced” — may eventually try to move onto television sets, but it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer.

Joost, like Skype, requires users to download free software. In this case, the program will help them browse the Internet for channels and clips they're interested in, rather than make phone calls.

“We're currently in a test phase with a limited ‘beta' release, so we have content matching our base,” CEO Fredrik de Wahl said in an interview. “Comedy, sports, music, documentaries.”

He said the company has deals with Warner Music, “Bridezillas” producer September Films and “Big Brother” creator Endemol NV, among others, but plans to make content deals globally as the service grows.

Joost is owned by Luxembourg-based TVP Holdings SA, but it has offices in New York, London and Leiden, Netherlands, and expects to incorporate under the Joost name.

The Joost browser will be open for other software developers to create their own features. “They may be able to make interactive plug-ins we can't even think of,” de Wahl said.

The service will be ad-supported, but advertising will be briefer and less frequent than on regular TV. Viewers will have a broader selection of programming and will be able to watch whenever they want.

Daiwa Securities telecom analyst James Enck said that Joost's biggest challenge will be competition it faces from a host of rival products and services, but with Zennstrom and Friis behind it, it has to be seen as a serious player.

“I would be tempted to back them as people who will do well,” Enck said.

Zennstrom and Friis succeeded under similar circumstances with Skype, and earlier built and sold the file-sharing program Kazaa.

“History suggests, they introduced two of the most revolutionary — disruptive — products in the history of the Internet, and the most viral. Possibly this is a hat trick,” Enck said.

Enck, who has tested Joost, said that at the moment, so-so video quality was a potential problem. But overall, the product is noteworthy for “ease of use, a nice interface, and intuitive design” he said. The same ingredients played a key role in Skype's success.

CEO de Wahl said that unlike the original Kazaa, Joost will be seeking to work with content owners to prevent piracy. He said he hoped telecommunications companies wouldn't see it as a potential threat the way that Skype is.

Many telecoms hope to sell services streaming video onto television sets using the technology known as IPTV, or Internet Protocol TV.

Joost faces stiff competition from many other corners. The Internet is already crowded with free online channels, file sharing programs like BitTorrent, and video download services such as Google Inc.'s YouTube.

And then there's plain old television, and devices that piggyback off of it like VCRs, digital video recorders such as TiVo or more recently, gadgets like Slingbox that send TV shows elsewhere.

Friis said that Joost was the logical successor to Kazaa and Skype.

“Peer-to-peer technology is perfect for delivering broadcast in a very scalable way on the Internet,” Friis said in a videotaped interview on the company's Web site.

Translation: Joost's users will contribute some of their bandwidth to sharing video streams at the same time they download them for viewing, making it possible for the company to broadcast to a large audience from just a few computer servers distributed around the world.

The company is accepting applications for a limited number of people who want to try out the service, and said it intends to “rapidly expand.” It did not set a date for an official product launch.

Friis said the pair began building the company under the code name “The Venice Project” immediately after selling Skype and it now has around 150 employees.

Joost Information

More of Joost

Joost to combine the best of TV and the best of the Web

New York/London - January 16, 2007 - Today, the company formerly known under the code name The Venice Project has revealed its official brand, "Joost". Currently available in private beta testing, Joost combines the best of TV and the best of the Internet by offering viewers a unique, TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of Web 2.0.

Co-founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Joost fills a critical gap in the online video entertainment arena. Joost is powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.

"People are looking for increased choice and flexibility in their TV experience, while the entertainment industry needs to retain control over their content," said Fredrik de Wahl, chief executive officer of Joost. "With Joost, we've married that consumer desire with the industry's interests."

Joost is the first global TV distribution platform, bringing together advertisers, content owners and viewers in an interactive, community-driven environment. Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers broadcast-quality content to viewers for free.

"We've received positive and constructive feedback from our early beta-testers and are now at a stage where we're ready to reveal our true brand," said de Wahl. "The Joost name has global appeal, embodies fun and energy, and will come to define the 'best of TV and the best of the Internet'".

Joost Information

What is Joost

What is Joost? Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We're in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

We've put together some screenshots that anyone can use to illustrate stories or blog posts about Joost™. Ideally, we'd like you to use these rather than your own screenshots if possible - they've all been cleared with the content owners, and in any case we think they're quite pretty.

Joost™ is a new way to watch TV, free of the schedules and restrictions that come with traditional television. Combining the best of TV with the best of the internet, Joost™ gives you more control and freedom than ever before - control over what you watch, and freedom to watch it whenever you like. We're providing a platform for the best television content on the planet - a platform that will bring you the biggest and best shows from the TV studios, as well as the specialist programs created by professionals and enthusiasts. It's all overlaid with a raft of nifty features that help you find the shows you love, watch and chat with friends, and even create your own TV channels.



Stay tuned for more Joost Info.