Comments on: Joost bows to YouTube, gives up consumer video

It's the first bust for Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the duo that gave us Skype and Kazaa. Joost is dropping consumer service to focus on video platforms.

[codynews]

Good. I like wins by American companies. Youtube and Hulu = US companies. Joost = not.

[mobycat]

As if that makes any difference with an internet company.

[kgsbca]

Skype has yet to disrupt the telecom business, as their revenue per registered user amounts to little over $1 per year. The Joost founders never came up with any viable business model for any of their startups, other than to sell them to horribly mismanaged larger companies (ebay, under the leadership of California wannabe governor Meg Whitman, blew over $1B on Skype without any idea about how to make money off it).

Joost was doomed from the start, there is little incentive for consumers to open up their home networks and share their upstream bandwidth with studios and other giant companies, just to lower their costs of video distribution.

[J. Blow]

The client wasn't the problem. The simple fact of the matter is they didn't have compelling content when they launched and they never really caught up.

No content = no users every single time.

[ahickey]

Skype served a great pupose in getting cheaper calls.
I now pay a monthly flat fee for line rental, broadband and international call to over 30 countries at any time from the UK. The cost is about 1/3 of what I was paying before.
I believe Skype foreced the telcos to be more competitvie. it didn't give Skype more business because the telcos moved quickly but I know it worked for me.

[keepntabs]

I still go to Joost occassionally, and the need to download a client to view the content on the site was not a hinderance to me. I like that they offer programs that are made outside of the U.S., and that it is one of the few online video sites that I can launch when I travel outside of the U.S. My biggest gripe was finding a program. The search was cumbersome for me; as it is with TV.com. However, maybe if more online video content providers offered desktop apps like Hulu Desktop I think more would find success, because you can obtain the site content without launching a browser. This can be very helpful to people who have children, and allow them to watch online videos, but don't want them surfing on the Internet unsupervised.