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...
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