CBS, Viacom Invest in Joost

[edDV]

http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=12034

"Online television service Joost today said it has landed $45 million in funding from Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Li Ka Shing Foundation, CBS Corporation and Viacom. The money is earmarked for product development, global expansion and service offerings."

"Joost was founded in 2006 by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the brains behind Kazaa and Skype. Joost is designed as an ad-supported online alternative to TV."

[SingSing]

Skype has taken many landline customers from phone companies.

Joost may do the same for people have high speed internet access that don't want to pay high cable bill.

[RabidDog]

Niche product .. but how big is that niche ??

[jntaylor63]

The more "cable" shows Joost gets, the more people will join.

At 1st, it will appeal to HTPC and those that travel.

As it gets more content, priced less than cable or can do a la cart, we might start seeing set-top boxes.

[edDV]

Here's another Joost story 7 May.

Joost, Warner Bros. Team Up to Feature Programming Online
http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=12008&industryId=19

"Online Video service Joost inked a deal with Warner Bros. Television Group to feature a handful of Warner Bros. shows in branded channels on the service."

"The TV studio said it's the first time that it is offering Warner Bros.-branded programming services online.

"The channels will launch later this month and include shows such as "Adventures of Briscoe County," "Aquaman," "Babylon 5," "Crusade," "Human Target," "Invasion," "Max Headroom," "My Favorite Martian," "Prey," "Time Trax" and "V," "Growing Pains," Kung Fu" and "Sisters."

[FulciLives]

I'd like to try JOOST but it appears that right now it is in Beta Testing and someone already "in" has to invite you.

So if anyone is already a JOOST member and is willing to invite me ... please do so

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[edDV]

ditto. I need an invite.

[Soopafresh]

FYI, Joost licensed the h264 playback technology from CoreAVC.

[mh2360]

This is going to a problem for some of us UK users as a lot of our ISPs are now throttling speeds like crazy and imposing strict monthly usage limits.

I used it for an hour and clocked up about 400mb of downloaded data, So 40 hours of viewing a month would probably get me into trouble with my provider, i think ill give it a miss until i move to a more tolerent ISP.

[harrisonford]

Hello if you need a invite to Joost send a email to jrobertcanada@hotmail.com

I can get you Joost I have been a member for 2 months now it takes up to six weeks to be
invited, the programs is ok, there is no CSI or Soprano's lol it is wide and varied, the quaility is very good, I have the pregram as well I could send it to you, but you need a password and user name to sign, I know I have it lol.

I watch at 1650 * 1050 on a Acer 22 inch, not to bad, Joost is doing a good job so far, they are hiring encoders right, now and other such people. I could say more have to go, bye. I will check my email on Saturday May 12 2007, all those emailing me will get emailed back, with invite.

[edDV]

...
I watch at 1650 * 1050 on a Acer 22 inch, not to bad, ...

What video format and bit rate are they sending?

[harrisonford]

Joost Adds new offical Beta test 1.0 for offical launch today. they sent out notice to all users to download the new version of internet tv, that starts today,

[Seeker47]

Here's another Joost story 7 May.
"The TV studio said it's the first time that it is offering Warner Bros.-branded programming services online.
"The channels will launch later this month and include shows such as "Adventures of Briscoe County," "Aquaman," "Babylon 5," "Crusade," "Human Target," "Invasion," "Max Headroom," "My Favorite Martian," "Prey," "Time Trax" and "V," "Growing Pains," Kung Fu" and "Sisters."

Sounds like they are going with content that is by now mostly played out for syndication or DVD sales. (Why risk burning anything that still has significant revenue potential ?)

[edDV]

Here's another Joost story 7 May.
"The TV studio said it's the first time that it is offering Warner Bros.-branded programming services online.
"The channels will launch later this month and include shows such as "Adventures of Briscoe County," "Aquaman," "Babylon 5," "Crusade," "Human Target," "Invasion," "Max Headroom," "My Favorite Martian," "Prey," "Time Trax" and "V," "Growing Pains," Kung Fu" and "Sisters."

Sounds like they are going with content that is by now mostly played out for syndication or DVD sales. (Why risk burning anything that still has significant revenue potential ?)

Yes and it will be heavily compressed. Similar to offering to iTunes for download.

[gll99]

harrisonford wrote

Hello if you need a invite to Joost send a email to jrobertcanada@hotmail.com

Thanks for following up on this. I got the invite and downloaded the software although I haven't installed it yet. I'm watching and recording the Sens/Buff game right now so my pc is a bit tied up but I'll try it soon.

I read the terms of use and it looks like they use your bandwidth and hdd to share partial files cached on your hdd with other users

Partial terms

2. Permission from You for Joost™ Software to Deliver Advertising and Use Your Computer and Bandwidth to Provide Content to You and other users of Joost™ Software and to Manage the Network of Computers Running Joost™ Software

2.1.2. The Joost™ Software will utilize the processor, bandwidth and hard drive (or other memory or storage hardware) and/or cache of your computer (or other applicable device) for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between, and the transmittal of data, content, programming, services or features to, you and other Joost™ Software users, and to facilitate the operation of the network of computers running instances of the Joost™ Software.

2.1.3. The Joost™ Software will take organizational and technical measures intended to protect the privacy and integrity of the computer resources (or other applicable device) you are utilizing, however, you acknowledge and agree that this is not a representation or warranty of Joost.

from System Requirements

Joost is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of
bandwidth per hour. In 1 hour of viewing, 320 Mb will be downloaded and 105 Mb
uploaded, which means that a 1 Gb cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours.If you
pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP,
you should be careful to always exit the Joost program completely when you are
finished watching it.

So not counting overhead it's a 3 to 1 ratio. For every 3 bytes you receive you give out about 1 byte of data to another group of users. Sounds like it's built on a filesharing platform so they don't need to pay for large server space and usage to store and send / receive the videos.

I visited the forum and noticed lots of complaints about retricted content to USA users only. They call it "Region Limitations" and it seems that a vast amount of "commercial" type old tv show content etc.. can't be viewed if your ip is outside the USA. Users complain that since they use advertisement to pay for the programming why restrict the content?

I wonder if content is restricted for Canadian ip's also. The only concern I have is that over the 2 or more months, no agent of Joost has commented in the forum threads where these questions and complaints were raised.

btw) One warning you could easily miss which I quoted above is worth repeating. While the program is minimised to your task bar or system tray it still uses your bandwidth, cpu and other system resources so if you are paying by the MB or have severe limits on MB down/upload, make sure to exit the program completely.

[hudsonf]

If anyone is still looking for invites you can ask here. http://aujoost.com/goodness/index.php I downloaded the program last night and will try it later tonight.

[hudsonf]

Just finished installing Joost. Setting here watching Starsky and Hutch and so far it's working great. The only problem I had was finding a user name that wasn't taken. I am new to P2P type programs and would like to know if Joost will cause any problems with my internet account with Comcast?