Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 9:09 AM PT

 

Joost to Become a White-Label Provider, Volpi Steps Down as CEO

Joost announced today that it is shifting business strategies and it “will focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators.” As part of this transition, Mike Volpi will step down as CEO and Matt Zelesko, who is currently the senior VP of engineering, will take over while still leading the engineering team. Volpi will remain chairman of the board.

What makes this move seem all the more doomed is that Joost is already enlisting another white-label video provider, Ooyala, to manage its ingesting, transcoding and metadata management. How exactly will Joost pitch itself as a competitor to Ooyala (where Volpi is also on the board) when it uses Ooyala itself?

Joost said it will maintain a core team in New York and London to work on the new white-label biz, as well as operating Joost.com. The company will “wind down” operations in its Leiden development center. According to a statement attributed to Volpi, Joost “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends,” which seems like it could not mean anything other than layoffs, but Joost wouldn’t elaborate further or provide specific numbers.

In April, it was rumored that Joost was looking to sell itself and had even talked with Time Warner Cable.

We used to joke here at NTV that becoming a white-label video provider was what a business did when all other strategies failed. And it looks like Joost is no exception. After starting off as a P2P-based app, the company found that requiring a download hampered its ability to gain traction. It then moved to a plug-in and eventually moved completely to a Flash based method for watching web TV.

But as Joost struggled to find its way, the door was open for rivals like Hulu to swoop in and establish themselves as premium content portals. A quick look at Compete.com shows how Hulu has soared while Joost pretty much flatlined:

But a bigger problem is that unlike Hulu, where its owners/content partners like NBC and FOX seem to take an active role in the success of the site, Joost’s media company investors Viacom and CBS treated the service like a red-headed stepchild. While Hulu has raked in brand-name content, Joost has tried to make do with its limited catalog. Earlier this month, the company signed 12 content partners — but none of them were big name TV or movie companies.

Joost was once heralded as the future of television. Times have changed.

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Topic: Distribution, Startups

Comments (8)

  • Joost as in toast

    wren — 9:21 AM on June 30, 2009 Reply

  • It’s hard to keep your head in the game when you’ve already made $2b on your other ventures. What’s the motivation? What keeps you going to work each day? They are already eating “steak” and not surviving on Jolt, Pizza and Mac & Cheese.

    This is also a great case of too much PR way to early on in the cycle and no follow through during crunch time. I guess if you have big egos to feed, PR does do the trick.

    Good luck with the white-box model, it seems to have worked for NO ONE yet.

    At least most of this venture was funded with OPM and they still have most of their cash for fun stuff.

    If I were them, I’d sit back,enjoy my money, buy a big TV and get Cable. I’d leave the World Changing to someone else who’s to blinded by the idea to know better.

    timekeeper — 12:40 PM on June 30, 2009 Reply

  • Goodbye Joost …Hello Video bay :P

    Matt — 12:47 PM on June 30, 2009 Reply

  • They probably sold that too! Argh…

    timekeeper — 12:53 PM on June 30, 2009 Reply

  • Okay, just speculating here, but … maybe the white label stuff will actually be live P2P? Would be quite ironic, wouldn’t it?

    Janko Roettgers — 2:38 PM on June 30, 2009 Reply

  • This is a how-to on installing Joost on Linux.

    Step 1: Boot computer*

    Step 2: Login**

    Step 3: Wait***

    Has Joost forgotten about their promise to the Linux community? A client for our platform and not from within WINE.
    They really don’t seem too terribly concerned with courting the Linux community. In counting around 120+ request for a schedule of a beta release for our platform I haven’t found any good answers. Standard brush-off?

    Throw the cross platform wording on the beta page and wait for the swarm of Digg users. Insta buzz! As far as actually providing a Lin* version? Yeah, whenever we get around to throwing something together.

    Robert MacEwan — 8:19 AM on July 4, 2009 Reply

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