Joost

» see joost.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i used skype. i used kazaa, on a windows xp box plugged into ttnet. joost was the same two men's third project. that one i never used, because the licensing map ran out before it reached turkey.

the pitch was clean: take the p2p delivery trick that scared the music industry, point it at television instead. ship a desktop client that streamed viacom-tier shows in near-tv resolution. zennström and friis had sold skype to ebay for $2.6 billion the year before, so they had cash and a million people willing to download a beta. by july 2007 they had exactly that. sequoia and index put up forty-five million dollars.

then the broadcasters who had licensed content to joost started their own things. hulu opened in march 2008. cbs's tv.com pivoted. once those existed, joost was the awkward middle: a separate desktop install asking you to learn another player when the network's own page just worked in the browser you already had.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the venice project, as it was called internally, was meant to do for tv what skype did for voice: route around the gatekeepers using the swarm. except voice was a free protocol the gatekeepers could not own. tv shows were owned. joost still had to license them, and the licenses came with geographical restrictions and a finite term.

so the very thing that made joost technically novel, p2p, did not buy the company anything against the actual constraint. it cost more bandwidth on the user's side and saved sony or viacom nothing on theirs.

~ the unraveling ~

the desktop client peaked at around a million sign-ups and never grew much past it. by december 2008 joost dropped the p2p client and went pure flash in the browser, which made it indistinguishable from every other web video product. mike volpi, the cisco veteran they hired as ceo, later pinned the failure on broadcasters, who he said sidelined joost as soon as they had their own portals running.

~ what got buried with it ~

the asset got sold to adconion in november 2009 and ran quietly until april 2012. the more interesting body in the grave is the idea: that you could disintermediate broadcast tv at the consumer layer with a clever protocol. youtube did the disintermediating, but with user-uploaded content and no licenses to honor. joost's heirs are not netflix or hulu. they are popcorn time and stremio, which kept the p2p part and dropped the licensing entirely.

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