Joost – Too Little, Too Early
I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.
They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.
The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.
Enter Joost.
Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.
1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.
2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.
3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.
Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us – the users – that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.
I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.
