News - Digital Media

There's a lot of action in the browser market these days: Google just launched its Chrome browser, Firefox 3.1 is due in months, Apple hopes Safari will spread across the world of Windows, and Microsoft is touting its second beta of Internet Explorer 8.

But a huge swath of Internet users still are getting by with IE 6, which is no doubt is why Google just released a new version of Gmail for the vintage 2001-era browser.

The update means IE 6 users will get access to colored labels for messages, Gmail Labs features, integration with AOL Instant Messenger, and invisible mode for IM, Google engineer Jon Perlow said on Google's Gmail blog on Friday. The upgrade catches IE 6 users up to features available to users of Firefox 3, IE 7, and Safari 3.

Google said it worked with Microsoft's IE engineers on some of other issues, including memory-related performance issue when running JavaScript programs in the browser, and Google pared back some user interface features that had been causing trouble for IE 6 users.

Update at 3:03 p.m. PDT, with comments from the attorney general from the state of Connecticut, which is one of the lead states in the multistate antitrust review of the Yahoo-Google deal.

The Association of National Advertisers announced Sunday it sent a letter to the head of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, citing its opposition to the controversial Yahoo-Google search advertising deal.

The ANA, a powerful group of more than 400 companies that spend more than $100 billion in marketing and commercial advertising, said it conducted a comprehensive and independent analysis of its members and held in-person discussions with both companies before sending the letter to Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's antitrust division.

In its announcement, the ANA stated:

The letter, authorized by the ANA board, notes that a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 percent of search advertising inventory and states ANA's concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search and advertising.

In issuing the letter, the ANA board, which includes a range of Fortune 500 companies such as Kellogg, The Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and Walt Disney, comes at a critical time in the review process by federal and state antitrust regulators.

As previously reported by CNET News, the Justice Department is expected to indicate in the coming weeks whether it will seek to block the proposed search deal and, on a state level, a multistate task force is expected to issue a decision in the fall.

For Yahoo, the nonexclusive deal with Google is viewed as a means for increasing its revenues by $800 million in its first year and bump up its operating cash flow by $250 million to $450 million, when it announced plans for the deal in June.

Under the deal, Google will supply some of its search ads to run on Yahoo's search pages. Yahoo has previously stated that on some of its Yahoo search pages, it has no relevant ads to post and that Google could fill in some of that virtual real estate with its ads. However, Yahoo could also chose to use Google's ads on some of its search pages where it too has its own ads.

When it announced its deal in June, Yahoo and Google said they would wait 100 days before implementing the partnership, in order to give antitrust regulators time to review the deal.

The Justice Department declined to comment whether it has received ANA's letter but noted the investigation into the Yahoo-Google deal is on-going.

Yahoo, in a statement, said it expects the Google deal to yield benefits to advertisers:

We are disappointed with the ANA Board's position regarding Yahoo!'s non-exclusive search marketing agreement with Google. Yahoo! remains steadfast in its belief that this deal--in which prices are determined by advertiser demand-driven auctions, and not by collaboration between Yahoo! and Google--will strengthen Yahoo!'s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo! marketplace for our advertisers.

Other advertisers have previously come out in support of the proposed deal, such as Tim Carter, founder of AsktheBuilder.com, who testified before Congress in support of the deal. Last July, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "The Google-Yahoo agreement and the future of Internet Advertising."

Although various legislators have weighed in on the Yahoo-Google partnership, ultimately, it is the federal and state antitrust regulators who have the power to potentially block the deal by filing a lawsuit.

While advertisers, either on an individual basis, or now as a group, are weighing in on both sides of the issue, the impact of their statements on the antitrust regulatory review process has yet to be seen.

When asked whether a trade group carries more weight in the states' review of the Yahoo-Google partnership, rather than a collection of individual advertisers, Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general for the state of Connecticut, which is one of the lead states in the multistate task force examining the proposed partnership, said:

The factual and legal merits and the anti-competitive effects of any practice will determine what the states will do.

The idea for the partnership first arose during Microsoft's unsolicited buyout bid for Yahoo, which brought pressure on the Internet search pioneer to show it could be just as valuable as a stand alone company. And although Microsoft has long since withdrawn its $33 a share buyout bid for Yahoo, the two Internet search companies are continuing with its efforts to move the partnership forward.

One might expect James Bond's MySpace page to list shaken martinis, Walther PPKs, and Aston Martins among his interests.

While that scenario is a bit far-fetched, agents for the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency are testing a social-networking site designed for use by analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, according to a report on CNN's Web site. Instead of posting thoughts on music and movies, the agents use the site--called A-Space--to share information on terrorist activities and troop movements around the world.

The social networking site has been undergoing testing for months and is expected to officially launch to the nation's entire intelligence community on September 22, CNN reported.

"It's every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it's much, much more," Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis, told CNN. "It's a place where not only spies can meet but share data they've never been able to share before. This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella."

The information posted to the new social network is highly classified and won't be accessible by the general public, CNN reported. Access will be limited to intelligence personnel with the proper security clearance and a reason to be examining particular information. A-Space's creators don't want the network to become a gold mine of sensitive information for future double agents.

"We're building (a) mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer told CNN. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space."

The GeoEye-1 satellite that launched into orbit Saturday is on a mission from Google.

Well, not just Google. The GeoEye-1 is part of the NextView program of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a dot-mil organization that, odd as it may seem, wants access to commercial satellite imagery to support its national security mission. GeoEye, the company, won its $500 million NextView contract four years ago.

Google's rocket-borne logo.

(Credit: GeoEye/ULA)

But the search titan does have the exclusive rights among online mapping sites to the GeoEye-1 images, which it will use in its Google Earth and Google Maps offerings. It even got its corporate logo emblazoned on the launch rocket, right below Boeing's.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were on hand at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for Saturday morning's launch, according to the Reuters news agency.

GeoEye said Saturday afternoon that the satellite had separated from the second stage of the Delta II rocket and was initializing its onboard systems.

The GeoEye-1 will zip around the Earth at about 4.5 miles per second, taking both color and black-and-white images from a distance of 423 miles. Its camera can distinguish objects on the ground as small as 16 inches in size, according to GeoEye. Because of U.S. licensing restrictions, Google's resolutions won't be quite that sharp.

High-resolution color images are expected later in the fall.

A GeoEye-2 satellite is scheduled for launch in 2011.

Adobe Systems' Flash technology may not have qualified for the Olympics, but it is in tip-top shape for the National Football League season just getting under way.

With the bulk of NFL teams hitting the gridiron in earnest Sunday, it'll be Flash that delivers the live video streaming on the Web of NBC's Sunday Night Football games. This marks the first time that full-length NFL games are widely available online in the U.S., according to Adobe and the NFL.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

The NFL-Adobe partnership wouldn't normally be quite so notable--after all, Flash is one of the most well-established technologies on the Web. But it was only a few short weeks ago that NBC had delivered streaming video from the Beijing Olympics courtesy of a technology that's looking to overturn Flash's dominance: Microsoft Silverlight.

The Olympics deal no doubt stuck in Adobe's craw; NBC has said that it initially expected to use Flash for the Olympics. Adobe's press release on the NFL deal certainly doesn't mention the upstart Silverlight by name, but it does get in a subtle bit of trash-talking--the widespread, existing installation of Flash on desktop PCs "will enable fans to access NFL games on the Web without having to download additional software."

Anyone who wanted to watch NBC's online streaming of the Olympics first had to download Silverlight, an additional step that some folks may not have been ready to take.

Its name notwithstanding, the Web-streamed Sunday Night Football Extra (delivered via NFL.com and NBCSports.com) made its debut Thursday, with the season's inaugural game between the Washington Redskins and last season's Super Bowl champions, the New York Giants. On Sunday, the streaming video will start up on its namesake day with the Week 1 nighttime contest between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts.

Beyond the live streaming, fans get some interactive extras, including alternative camera angles, in-game highlights, live statistics, and a live blog.

The experience may be something of a mixed bag. Writing at Silicon Alley Insider, Michael Learmouth had this to say about Thursday night's streaming video:

We gave it a try and there were some hiccups. Inititally, we couldn't get the live stream, and were told we had been placed in a queue 'due to overwhelming demand.'

Once the video began, it was pixelated and jumpy, and there's no full-screen mode. But there were some cool features, such as a 'star cam' trained on individual players like Fred Smoot and Plaxico Burress.

We were asked to watch a Sprint pre-roll ad to get to the video, and there were a few online ads within the broadcast, but not nearly as many as on TV. In fact, during most TV ad breaks, online viewers were sent to the NFL network studio for recaps of other games, which is nice but perhaps a sign advertising for the Webcast wasn't sold out.

As for the Flash-Silverlight competition, that will have to play itself out over time. As noted by Paul Glazowski at the Mashable blog:

It's not an impossibility for Silverlight to grow, mind you. Given the right level of attention to the platform, Microsoft could mark its Olympic foray as only the first big starter in the long slog toward mass adoption. But 'could' is the key word. The hill climbs (yes, climbs plural) will be trying.

One key challenge, Glazowski says, is "to convince the public of its validity and utility in the presence" of a "semi-household" name like Flash.

It wasn't long ago that we weren't able to "Google" people, places and things.

But, observes CBS News Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg, in just 10 years, Google has grown exponentially from garage start-up to Web juggernaut--and a verb as well as a noun.

As Google marks its 10th anniversary this weekend, it's become "part of culture, much like Xerox," points out John Battelle, who wrote a best-seller about the rise of Google called The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

He notes that the verb "google" quickly became synonymous with speedy learning on virtually every subject.

"Nearly anything and everything to get smart on any topic exists on the Web," says Battelle, "and Google does a good job of organizing it."

"Good," remarks Sieberg, "may be an understatement." These days, more people use Google than all other search engines combined.

Of course, that hasn't always been that way.

"Google wasn't first," says Sieberg. "They were just the best."

Remember Lycos? AltaVista?

Yahoo once held the mantle for search, but even with its catchy name and expensive advertising, Google was able to make its way into the mainstream, mostly by word-of-mouth, and without airing a single commercial, Sieberg says.

In January 2005, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes, "We just let a few of our friends know about it so they would go to that Web site--search engine--and try it out, and people started to use it."

Brin and Google's other renowned co-founder, Larry Page, started the company as Stanford grad students in a garage.

They now run the it from what's called the Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif.

Workers enjoy an array of not-so-typical perks, such as billiards, a pool, volleyball court, and much more.

Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock says, "They're certainly working. But they're also having a lot of fun. One of the things we believe is that you want to make an environment that's efficient for people so that, in their personal lives, they can live and enjoy and have a great time and, when they're working, they can focus on getting their work done."

The Google search page design hasn't changed all that much since 1998. For a full gallery of Google's search engine rivals a decade ago, click on the image.

(Credit: The Wayback Machine, via CNET Networks)

And plenty of folks would like to try--Google gets some 7,000 job applications--a day.

All that inspiration within the company, says Sieberg, has led Google to countless projects beyond just search--"not that that's always a good thing."

Battelle says concerns may be reflected in Google's stock price, which went from $85 when the company went public in August 2004 to a high of almost $715 last year, then down to its current price of about $465 dollars.

"The big question," says Battelle, "is, can they choose the right directions? Can they let go of the things that perhaps they aren't very good at doing and just focus on three, four, five projects that, taken together, make for a cohesive company that can win in every market it's in?"

In addition to the fluctuating stock price, Sieberg says, Google's had some ups and downs with public opinion, mostly attributed to privacy concerns over what happens to all that search info.

So, Sieberg concludes, in some ways, Google is still finding its way--at 10 years old.

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The second alpha of Firefox 3.1 was made available overnight. The software, code-named Shiretoko, is at this stage intended for software developers and testers only, with the stable and recommended version of Firefox being 3.0.1.

In a statement, Mozilla said the testing version of Firefox introduced several new features, including the browser's highly anticipated support for a new video tag element introduced with the HTML 5 standard to provide more functionality around the amount of video that is increasingly being delivered through Web browsers.

In addition, Shiretoko allows users to drag and drop tabs between browser windows, improves performance in some areas and provides better integration with Windows Vista's Aero 'Glass' theme for those wanting to add extra themes on top of Firefox.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mozilla is planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although it could be tested by following a set of instructions posted online.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla's Web site.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Social networks are designed to be all about friends, right? Yet when it comes to the competition behind the scenes at social networks, I'm reminded of the '70s song by War, "Why can't we be friends?"

That song especially comes to mind with Google's OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It's designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work seamlessly with other social networks using the platform. (Some argue it's also designed to compete with Facebook's developer platform.)

And if companies aren't comfortable with the OpenSocial premise--for fear that it's just an anticompetitive ploy--they now have a nonprofit foundation that will help ease their mind.

"This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity," wrote Dan Peterson on the OpenSocial Foundation blog.

Specifically, the foundation will provide operational guidelines about the technology and details on intellectual property as the platform changes and grows.

(The whole thing reminds me of when Microsoft submitted its streaming media compression technology, or codecs, to an industry standards body so that they would be adopted by Hollywood. Critics were wary of the software giant's past monopolistic behavior.)

For its part, the OpenSocial Foundation has a new board of directors that spans the industry. It includes Anil Dharni, director of products at the social network hi5; Google Director of Engineering David Glazer; Joe Greenstein, founder of the movie site Flixster; Allen Hurff, a vice president of engineering at MySpace; and Sam Pullara, a vice president of platforms at Yahoo.

The foundation will choose two other members from the community at large by vote. Perhaps someone from Facebook?

Google made its long-rumored foray into Web browsers with the introduction of its open-source Chrome, but in the process, it ruffled some privacy feathers.

Word of the browser first accidentally leaked on the Web in the form of a detailed 38-page comic book that appeared on Google Blogoscoped, an unofficial Google blog.

The browser was written with WebKit, the open-source engine at the core of Apple's Safari and Google's Android. The browser is also getting a new JavaScript virtual machine, V8. It's said to be a better solution for complex and rich Web applications, yielding better performance and "smoother drag and drops" in interactive applications.

The project should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies just entered the battlefield.

Even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Chrome, Google said during its launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today's Web-based applications.

In short, Chrome is more of a long-term competitive threat to Microsoft Office and Windows than it is to Internet Explorer. That may sound a little grand, but the evidence is on display in Google's own lobby, where the search company's computer kiosks present a browser only--no start menu, no desktop shortcuts, no operating system.

So how does Chrome actually stack up? Google was eager to toot its horn about Chrome's performance running JavaScript, a programming language used to power many sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail site, and Zoho's online application suite. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition.

However, Mozilla fought back with some performance results to show a forthcoming version of Firefox outpacing Chrome in a different test called SunSpider.

Firefox 3.1, which Mozilla hopes to release by the end of the year, comes with JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey. In Mozilla's test that pitted TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox against the Chrome beta, Google's browser was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.

Privacy advocates objected to Chrome's End User License agreement, which appeared to give Google a perpetual right to use anything one entered into the browser. Section 11 stated that although users retain copyright to their works, "by submitting, posting, or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute any content which you submit, post, or display on or through the services."

However, Google backtracked, saying it plans to alter those contract terms. Google said the change, once made, will apply retroactively to anyone who has downloaded the browser.

Privacy concerns were also raised over the issues of what information Google plans to store on its servers. Provided that users leave on the auto-suggest feature in Chrome and have Google as their default search provider, Google has the right to store any information typed into Chrome's Ominibox, which serves as both search bar and address bar. Google told CNET News that it plans to store about 2 percent of all such data, along with the IP address of the computer that entered the information.

Going mobile
Google co-founder Sergey Brin expects the Chrome technology to make its way to Android, the company's mobile-phone operating system and software suite. Chrome and Android were developed largely separately, Brin said in an interview at the Chrome launch event.

"We have not wanted to bind one's hands to the other's," Brin said. But you can expect that to change, now that both projects are public and nearing their first final releases.

"Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack," Brin said, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area.

When and if that happens, Google will have to contend with Apple, which has seen a large increase in the iPhone's global Web share, according to new figures. The figures, collected by Web analytics company Net Applications, show that in June 2008, before the launch of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone had 0.16 percent share of the operating-system market, as measured by OS detection during Web browsing; and in July, it had 0.19 percent.

However, as of September 1, the iPhone had 0.3 percent of global market share, an increase of 58 percent in one month. According to Net Applications, this was due to the July launch of the iPhone 3G. The figures also showed Microsoft's dominance steadily, if slowly, decreasing.

Meanwhile, AT&T said it had fixed a problem that caused many iPhone users in the northeastern United States to complain that they couldn't access the mobile Web. The problem, which caused some users to not be able to surf the Web on their phones, did not affect phone calls, text messages, or mobile e-mail from devices such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry.

And it looks as though Microsoft is joining Apple and Google in the mobile "application store" market. The software giant expects to launch "Skymarket" this fall for its Windows Mobile platform, if a recent job posting spotted by Long Zheng at Istartedsomething.com is accurate. According to the ad, posted on Computerjob.com, the Skymarket senior product manager will head a team that will "drive the launch of a v1 marketplace service for Windows Mobile."

Tech goes to the Republican convention
While John McCain saw a flood of online donations last week, thanks to his newly announced vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, his campaign was steering Web donors to a site that helps victims of Hurricane Gustav.

The Republican Party canceled nearly all scheduled events for the Republican National Convention on Monday, save official business, out of respect for those impacted by the hurricane. However, a few special guests remained on the docket of speakers at the St. Paul Xcel Energy Center, including Cindy McCain and First Lady Laura Bush.

"I would ask that each one of us commit to join together to aid those in need as quickly as possible," Cindy McCain said. "As John has been saying for the last several days, this is a time when we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats."

Republican National Convention leaders also asked convention attendees to pledge donations to hurricane relief funds via text to the code 2HELP, using the keyword GIVE.

Hurricane Gustav's unexpected interference with the four-day event highlighted the deft communications needed to direct nearly 5,000 delegates and alternate delegates through the formal presidential nomination process. The RNC turned to cloud computing for the most efficient means of registering the delegates, and when the clouds of Hurricane Gustav threatened to throw the event off course, the RNC stepped up their communications with the delegates.

Early in the week, before the storm subsided, Republican leaders were reviewing the convention schedule on a day-to-day basis to determine whether to proceed with planned events. The party maintained a text message alert system for the delegates "to keep them fully informed not only of delegate activities but also to get them information about the storm," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said.

McCain got the enthusiastic endorsements of two of Silicon Valley's best-known female executives, who said he was a far more attractive candidate than his Democratic rival on economic and tax grounds.

The pro-McCain pair were Meg Whitman, who stepped down as eBay's chief executive officer in March, and Carly Fiorina, the chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. Both are active in the McCain campaign; both have been talked about as receiving high-level appointments, if McCain is elected.

Also of note
Comcast is appealing a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that found the broadband provider had illegally blocked some customers' Web traffic...Silicon Valley start-up NebuAd has suspended plans to deploy a controversial program that displays ads based on the monitoring of Web activity while Congress reviews privacy concerns...Intel is expected to announce the "Dunnington" processor later this month, the first six-core processor and last of its Penryn chips...Apple sent out invitations for a music-related event next week, and the smart money is on new iPods.

Joost isn't letting the public try out the site yet but that will change soon.

(Credit: Joost)

Finally, Joost is going to correct the error that badly hobbled the Web video service many once considered to be a serious YouTube competitor.

Currently available for Windows and Mac, Joost is planning to launch a test version of its new site later this month that will feature a browser-based plug-in and will no longer require users to watch via the company's much maligned desktop client. In a not so surprising move, users will be able to embed Joost's videos.

CEO Mike Volpi acknowledged in an interview with CNET that the desktop client was one of the company's missteps but that the new browser-based player would provide ease of use, a high-quality video experience, and more content. The new site, according to Volpi, will even be less taxing on laptop batteries. News of Joost's new site was first reported by The Industry Standard.

But the big question that Joost must answer is whether the site overhaul comes too late to catch to Hulu or Google's YouTube.

Joost pounced onto the online-video scene with seemingly the right combination of founders, investors, and technology. The media instantly christened it a legitimate YouTube killer.

The start-up was the brainchild of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Among the backers were media conglomerates Viacom and CBS, parent company of CNET, publisher of News.com. Joost was powered by the same peer-to-peer technology that turned Skype and Kazaa into the most disruptive forces in the telephone and music sectors, respectively.

The public wasn't impressed. The content offering was thin. The player often stalled or stuttered, and it relied on the desktop client--meaning that you couldn't just log on to the Web from any computer to access your Joost account.

Volpi came on a year ago, and not much changed until January, when the company's CTO left and Volpi initiated a house cleaning. Volpi says it's still too early in the game to crown any site a winner.

"There is still ample opportunity to create a portal or aggregation site," Volpi said in an interview last week. "People will go where they can find the content they want."

Yes, but are Web video fans already used to getting what they want at Hulu, the company created by NBC Universal and News Corp? The competitor launched last spring to glowing press reviews, and traffic has continued to mushroom. A report issued this week by LiveRail reported that Hulu is probably already generating as much revenue as YouTube, which launched in 2005.

When it comes to YouTube, the Google property is still far and away the Internet's most popular video site. More than a third of every video viewed online is at YouTube. But YouTube is a user-generated site, with most of its content 10 minutes or shorter. Joost is much more like Hulu, a distribution platform for mostly professionally made content.

Volpi said Joost has greatly enhanced the content selection. The site will feature shows from Warner Bros., CBS, and Comedy Central, as well as other Viacom properties. Volpi said Joost will eventually offer a greater selection than Hulu. Volpi said Hulu offered little outside of the shows from NBC and Fox.

He called the selection "tired."

Joost's videos will follow a five-second advertisement or "preroll." Despite enabling users to embed video, the site will not concentrate on syndicating content.

"Our plan is to be a destination site where people go to watch their favorite shows," Volpi said.