The Social

NEW YORK--Not so long ago, Web video start-up Joost was looking a lot like the Waterworld of Web 2.0.

"We had a company and a product," the company CEO Mike Volpi said here in an interview at Joost's office, a brightly lit space a few blocks from Union Square that the company moved into several months ago. "It didn't work particularly well. We needed a new company, culturally, product-wise, target market wise."

Volpi now hopes that he can steer Joost's trajectory away from something like one of those big-budget movies that tanks at the box office, and turn it into the equivalent of a runaway DVD hit.

Built by Skype and Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom and originally known under the shady codename "The Venice Project," Joost was buzzed about long before its launch as a potential "YouTube killer." It was pumped full of venture capital from both Silicon Valley firms and entertainment-industry stalwarts (including CBS, which now publishes CNET News) excited about the possibility for an online video hub free of the piracy issues that continue to plague YouTube. At its initial launch, Joost invite codes were traded around the blogosphere like currency.

But after high-profile content partnership announcements from CBS and Viacom, the big-name deals stopped rolling in and the limited selection became a target of criticism. Then, NBC Universal and News Corp. launched their joint venture, Hulu, and achieved a reaction opposite to Joost's--ridiculed and nicknamed "Clown Co." before its launch, the video portal was a surprise hit.

The Joost model--a downloadable peer-to-peer video client--became swiftly outdated as streaming video took off. "In Internet years, that was a long time ago," Volpi said of the company's decision to originally structure its software around a download."A lot of content owners were very concerned about basic Internet security. That was the reality two and a half years ago."

Joost then had to deal with some particularly negative press. Bloggers turned up the vitriol. A feature story in Portfolio magazine described the company's path as going from "from superhero to life support." Joost enjoyed a brief moment back in the spotlight, or at least on the desktops of bored office workers, when it streamed all of the NCAA's "March Madness" tournament games live, but it quickly fell off the radar again.

Volpi, a former high-profile executive at Cisco who was long rumored to be a potential successor to CEO John Chambers, joined the Joost in June 2007, shortly after its commercial launch. The buzz was fading, but the declarations of death hadn't yet set in.

In due time, the start-up ditched its peer-to-peer model altogether and started developing a Web-based version. "Three months after we launched, we got out of beta on the client app," Volpi said. "We shut it down and started developing the Web app."

Joost also quietly slimmed down its employee headcount from nearly 200 employees to just shy of 100. Its lofty international ambitions were trimmed back to focus on the U.S. market. Though Volpi is based in London, Joost's hub is now the 45-employee New York office. They're closer to the media and entertainment industries now, Volpi explained, as well as to the people they need to negotiate with regarding digital rights.

"As a company, internally, we finally turned the corner in the late summer," Volpi said. Now, several months later, he believes it's paying off.

Joost redux
In October, Volpi said, the site pulled in 600,000 unique visitors in the U.S. and 600,000 abroad. In November, that was up to 1.2 million in the U.S. and 1 million elsewhere. That's very small compared to YouTube's 100 million viewers or even Hulu's 23 million, according to the October numbers from traffic firm ComScore, but it shows that Joost indeed still has a pulse. There's enough funding to last "well into next year," Volpi added, and said that he hopes to make Joost profitable late in 2009.

It charges between $10 and $45 for advertising CPMs, not far off from the $25 to $35 reported for Hulu a few months ago.

The new Joost has an iPhone app, something that Hulu doesn't have yet. It also has Facebook Connect built in, as of last Friday, and Tuesday announced a deal with nine new independent music labels to bring more music videos and concert footage to the site. On that note, there's something else: new Joost, unlike the old Joost, has a target demographic. The average user is only 25 or 26 years old, viewers skew about 60 percent male, and advertisements have a clear bent toward the coveted 18 to 34 age bracket. Some of its biggest hits have been music videos and Japanese animation, Volpi said.

But even though things have been looking up, Joost's challenges are far from over. You can't simply scrub away bad press, and the recession will obviously make things even more difficult. There's also the fact that in addition to Hulu and YouTube, it now also faces competition from the likes of Sling.com, MTVMusic.com, and a host of others.

"Like all interesting markets there's a ton of people trying to do the same thing," Volpi said of the glut in online video. "(We're) less focused on the competition and more focused on trying to find the right answer."

So if he had to go back and change things, would he have gotten rid of the buzz? Volpi said he's not sure.

"It's a mixed bag. Being honest, had that hype not existed, I think the whole market would be in a different place," Volpi explained. "In some ways, obviously, it hurt us because it's an enormous challenge living up to those expectations."

"But you can't have your cake and eat it too," he concluded. "You've just got to live with that. That's a consequence we got as a result of the exposure in the early days."

Disclosure: CBS Corp., which publishes CNET News, is an investor in Joost.

Some critics declared video service Joost kaput when big-network rival Hulu debuted last spring, far exceeding expectations.

But Joost, founded by the team behind Skype and Kazaa, wants you to know it's still going strong. The company announced Monday that it now has more than 7,000 hours of video programming available and that it has hired former Dailymotion employees Danny Passman and John Schultz. They have joined the video start-up as global head of programming strategy and director of programming strategy, respectively. Both are also MTV Networks veterans.

The company has also made a number of other executive hires in recent weeks, from chief architect to chief financial officer.

One of the hurdles that Joost has faced is that you must download its client in order to stream its content; you can't stream directly from the Web. Joost representatives have said that a Web-based version of its software will be available sometime in 2008 and that it will start featuring more live programming. The service briefly reappeared on the tech chatter radar when it streamed every March Madness college basketball game live.

A British newspaper reported last month that Joost was slimming down some of its lofty global plans to focus more on the U.S. market.

Regardless, Joost says it's going strong, with 400 TV shows and 1,200 movies and short films in its line-up. That's a lot more than Hulu, which has 250 TV shows and 100 full-length movies, as well as clips from an additional 150 TV shows and 50 movies. But with the backing of NBC Universal and News Corp., Hulu has a leg up in the quality department: while Joost has deals with big conglomerates like Viacom, many of them haven't made their top-notch shows available to the video service.

This post was updated at 10:12 AM PT to correct the spelling of Joost CEO Mike Volpi's name.

Could a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer software save Joost, the heavily hyped video start-up founded by the creators of Skype and Kazaa?

Portfolio's Kevin Maney wrote a lengthy profile of the once-hot company, and buried inside is a juicy tidbit about a future development: "This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window," the profile read. Right now, Joost requires a software download, which critics have said is one of its prime setbacks when just about every other online video start-up is browser-based. "Go to Joost's Web site, click on shows like Seth Green's edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you'd watch a video on YouTube." Well, that all depends on the technology working as smoothly as YouTube, and the quality being up to par.

Representatives from Joost were not immediately available to confirm that a Web-based version of the video player is on track for later in 2008.

Joost could use a boost. Once touted as a "YouTube killer" that would address rampant online video piracy by offering professional content creators access to a high-quality video platform and revenue from top-notch advertisers, it fell from favor when the content proved tepid and more enticing competitors sprang up--namely Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

Recently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, whose company counts Joost among the partners in its "Audience Network" of online video outlets, said that he hasn't given up on it and that CEO Mike Volpi "knows what he's doing."

And perhaps Joost can resuscitate itself. While the Web-based Joost remains shadowy, the company has been making other moves: experimenting with live TV programming, for one, starting with the NCAA basketball championship. It's a good PR move, as the availability of "March Madness" games has, at least for now, put Joost back into the vocabulary of Web users--and onto the computer screens of workplace procrastinators.

Some would say that peer-to-peer video start-up Joost, created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, failed to live up to the overwhelming hype that surrounded it. CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith, whose CBS Audience Network of online video sites includes a partnership with Joost, isn't one of them.

Speaking to a small gathering of tech and media reporters at CBS' New York headquarters Thursday, Smith gave a firm "no" when asked if Joost--which requires a software download and has slipped from the Web video radar since its buzzworthy debut--was dead in the water. "(Mike) Volpe knows what he's doing," Smith said of the Cisco Systems veteran who serves as the start-up's CEO. "It's got a good team."

Smith did add that he thinks Joost should be Web-based, not a download.

And with regard to Hulu, the joint Web-video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that has turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise, Smith would not rule out the possibility that CBS might jump on board, presumably by adding Hulu to its list of Audience Network distribution partners--which include AOL, Bebo, Microsoft, Sling Media, Veoh, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com. He said that there are no technological barriers to bringing CBS' video content to Hulu and that CBS Interactive's "door is always open."

Regarding Hulu's team, Smith said, "We talk to them all the time.".

Online video start-up Joost, which focuses on ad-supported professional content, made a few headlines (and raised a few eyebrows) for inking some big advertising deals with major corporations before the downloadable software was even open to the public. Until this point, most of those advertisements were traditional video advertisements that popped up before and in between clips on Joost.

That's no longer the case. On Thursday, Joost announced that Coca-Cola's European division has created the first "commercial widget" for the software. Called "Coke Bubbles," the downloadable advertising widget lets you choose a clip on Joost and then send it to fellow Joost users, appended with a note in the form of a "bubble."

So, in essence, it's a bit like those Pop-Up Video shows that VH-1 did back in the '90s, except not quite as customizable.

Social media advertising is still an extremely young sector of the industry, and plenty of observers are wondering whether it will actually work; many agree, however, that some element of interactivity needs to be present to bring the experience beyond a banner or video ad that will likely be ignored.

But according to Joost, widgets on the software will go beyond advertising. Coca-Cola has also partnered with Joost on an initiative to help more developers create applications for the video software; Joost will be holding "Developer Days" events in London on Friay, in Amsterdam on December 1, and in New York on December 7. (In London? The event will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. GMT, at Wallacespace on 2 Dryden Street.)

Joost has also partnered with instant-messaging start-up Meebo to power chat operations among viewers.

(Credit: Joost (screengrab by Mashable))

The founders of online television start-up Joost, who also count Skype and Kazaa as bullet points on their resumes, have announced that the service now has one million users. Still in beta and technically invite-only (though invitations are now easy to find), Joost was one of the most-talked-about tech products of last year. Originally known by the Bond-worthy codename "The Venice Project," Joost was widely touted as a "YouTube killer" before people really knew what it was--in truth, the service is a slick interface for free, ad-supported video content on-demand. No cat videos there.

Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom made the announcement while at a Skype press conference in the Eastern European high-tech hub of Tallinn, Estonia.

The catch is that one million beta testers absolutely doesn't translate to one million active beta testers. I've been playing with Joost since the early days, and I tend to agree with much of the feedback I've heard about the start-up: amazing interface, effective peer-to-peer architecture, but a noticeable lack of worthwhile content. Last I checked, the most worthwhile draws were still National Geographic documentaries, a few CNN talk shows, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. (I'm in Boston right now. Will I get in trouble for saying that?)

Right now, my beta account lies fallow, and I'm sure at least a handful of the other million users could say the same. But when Joost starts offering an impressive lineup of the stuff that I've been either recording on my DVR or buying from the iTunes Store--right now, for the record, my current must-watch is AMC's Mad Men--then I'll start tuning in again.