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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.
Seesmic: No Business in “Video Conversations”
We haven’t written about Seesmic on NewTeeVee in a long time, and it sounds like this may well be the last time. The company is deemphasizing — though at this point not removing — its video conversation service in favor of supporting its social aggregation tool, Seesmic Desktop, and associated products. CenterNetworks had the news this morning after noticing that video was pushed way down to the bottom of Seesmic’s site in a redesign.
Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur posted a video on his site (at least he still uses the service!) saying that the video community was not growing and he needed to direct his company towards something more promising. He asserted that competitors like 12seconds are not seeing growth, either. It can only be a matter of time before San Francisco-based Seesmic shuts down video entirely.
Seesmic’s video service enabled users to post public threaded asynchronous video comments on its own site and in the comments sections of participating sites. At times the company had experimented with producing original shows and hosting chat sessions with famous people, but those petered out. We can’t think of a video service offering an exact alternative with the same global and public emphases, but quick-upload video from phones and webcams is definitely growing on larger sites like YouTube and Facebook.
Seesmic had raised significant funding — $12 million — but has also made multiple rounds of layoffs.
Veodia Acquires ScreenToaster for Screencasting
Veodia, a live-streaming service for enterprises, announced today that it has acquired screencasting compay ScreenToaster. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ScreenToaster offers a free, browser-based screen capture service that allows users to record screen activity and audio without additional software or plug-in installation. According to Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen, Veodia customers were asking for screen recordings to share product demos and how-tos.
This is Veodia’s first acquisition and will not only provide a service customers are asking for, said Cohen, but also push the company more into the consumer space. Cohen said there are new consumer services on the way that will be based on the ScreenToaster technology, but wouldn’t elaborate on what those plans were.
Paris-based ScreenToaster currently has five employees and Cohen said they are figuring out how many of them will be brought to the U.S.. ScreenToaster raised an angel round of funding in September 2008.
Veodia raised $8.3 million last year and Cohen said the company still has most of it. Veodia went through a round of layoffs earlier this year, letting “six to seven” people go.
Vid-Biz: Fox Interactive, Telenovelas, Web Series
Fox Interactive Media Planning Layoffs; how many people affected is unknown, company also decided to not move into the fancy new Playa Vista offices. (The LA Times)
Univision and Televisa in a Battle Over Telenovelas on Broadband; judge will hear evidence tomorrow to decide whether an exclusivity agreement between the two companies that dates back to 1992 includes online video. (The LA Times)
CBS Interactive Develops Four New Web Series; Below the Law, Knights of the Not-So-Round Table, American Baby and Dick Rathbone: Office Tool won’t get beyond pilot phase until a sponsor comes on board. (MediaWeek) In other web series news, Reveille and MSN have teamed up for Fit to Boom (sponsored by Subway), which focuses on Baby Boomers making big health-driven life changes. (The Hollywood Reporter) And Tilzy.tv is hosting the web video “Onfronts” tomorrow, with new clips from The Bannen Way from Crackle, the next season Prom Queen from Vuguru and Illeana Douglas’ next season of Easy to Assemble. (release)
Pirate Party Wins Entry Into European Parliament; group (not formally connected with the Pirate Bay) won 7 percent of Swedish votes to gain a seat that Sweden holds in the Parliament. (CNET)
Babelgum to Run Over-Fishing Documentary; The End of the Line will appear as a six-part series online and on mobile today, World Oceans Day. (Screen Daily)
Brightcove Signs Philadelphia Inquirer; Philly.com to use the white-label service for its online video needs. (emailed release)
Head of Yahoo Video Division to Leave
Satish Menon, VP of the Consumer Platforms Group at Yahoo (aka the video platform division, with responsibility for video infrastructure, software and advertising), will soon leave the company, he told us over the weekend.
Menon’s departure comes on the heels of major layoffs — 20 to 25 employees, we’re told — on the Yahoo Video team earlier this month, as well as attrition across that team as video has been de-emphasized. We’ve contacted Yahoo for official comment but have not heard back. Yahoo also would not confirm the number laid off.
Menon, who prior to Yahoo co-founded Kasenna, told us via email that his post-Yahoo plans are to introduce community into online education using online social tools. He did not say if he was joining or starting a specific company, but said he would leave Yahoo “soon.”
Vuze Looks For Money In Porn
P2P video startup Vuze quietly launched an adult video download service called StudioHD earlier this year. StudioHD offers an unlimited number of HD porn video downloads for a monthly fee that are subsequently facilitated through Vuze’s BitTorrent client. The company told me that StudioHD is a template for other premium services it plans to launch.
A premium adult outlet seems to be logical step for a company like Vuze, given the popularity of porn on P2P networks, but it’s also another indicator of how difficult it is to monetize P2P. Vuze has raised a total of $32 million in funding. Plans to sell rentals of major TV networks didn’t work out, and Vuze was forced to lay off 24 people last year as well as move out of its costly downtown Palo Alto, Calif., office space. And while Vuze (aka Azureus) used to be the most popular BitTorrent client, it has lost steam to competitors like uTorrent.
Metacafe Kills Off Producer Rewards Program
Independent creators hoping to make a buck off their videos have one less outlet to do so. Metacafe announced yesterday that it will terminate its Producer Rewards Program June 30.
In a corporate blog post, Metacafe said:
While we have worked to maintain the Producer Rewards program during the past year, we are now faced with a market environment that requires us to focus on profitability in the near term and are not in the position to continue to subsidize the program.
The move to halt payment for UGC isn’t surprising. In October of last year, the site chopped producer payments by more than half to just $2 for every 1,000 views that came from within the United States.
60Frames Suspends Operations
New media studio 60Frames has suspended operations because of a lack of funding. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story, and we have confirmed.
Launched in July of 2007, 60Frames was incubated by Hollywood talent agency UTA and web ad firm Spot Runner (which is having its own troubles) and raised $3.5 million in funding. The company promised to provide “professional content creators access to financing, speed to market, greater ownership over their intellectual property, and participation in all revenue streams including advertising.”
Vudu Goes Box-free for Entone
“Over the top” video services carry the implication of going behind the backs of existing television operators. But two of the (admittedly smaller) players in IPTV and web-delivered video on demand are teaming up to give us a glance of what a united future could look like.
Entone, an IPTV set-top box and service provider, is announcing today it has teamed with Vudu to offer the latter’s library of 14,000 movie and TV titles, including 1,500 HD films.
The offering marks Vudu’s first “embeddable” version of its software sans its own hardware. The company, which has been through multiple price reductions and layoffs, looks to be moving in that direction: “[W]e want consumers to get access to Vudu through the devices they already have in their home,” said Edward Lichty, the company’s EVP of strategy and content.
The joint Entone-Vudu offering, which is supposed to launch at the end of June, will behave just like Vudu — same delivery software, same selection, same prices — but without the proprietary Vudu remote control.
Entone is also looking to sign more deals for web-delivered content, said CEO Steve McKay. He thinks he can accelerate adoption of the services by making them more easy to access. “You’re asking the consumer to buy special-purpose devices,” he said of other solutions like Roku, Apple TV and ZillionTV.
Entone has about 200,000 customers of 70 U.S. phone companies using its IPTV devices today, and they are all expected to have access to the Vudu service. Vudu has not released sales numbers.
Further reading/watching: We posted a video interview with McKay last October.
Move Networks Acquires Inuk for Broadcast TV on PCs
Move Networks has acquired UK-based virtual set-top box provider Inuk Networks in a deal that adds a broadcast component to Move’s ongoing efforts to distribute television over the Internet. The purchase price was not disclosed but it at least partly involved Move shares. Inuk had raised an $18.5 million second round only last June, but according to paidContent:UK, ran through its funding building a PC IPTV service that only had some 100,000 users, all university students.
Inuk already uses Move’s adaptive streaming technology as part of a deal the two companies did last year. Move, which currently powers mostly on-demand streaming but also some live events, said it plans to launch Inuk’s Freewire platform in the U.S. and Scandinavia later this year.
Inuk will remain in the UK and be branded as Move Networks, with Move’s major shareholders — including Steamboat Ventures, Hummer Winblad and Benchmark Capital — and Inuk’s major shareholders — including Wesley Clover, S4CDM and Cable&Wireless — continuing to have stakes in the combined entity.
Move has made layoffs and is currently seeking a replacement for its CEO. The company has raised $68 million from Benchmark Capital, Cisco, Comcast Interactive Media, Televisa, Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Though it has lost a bit of sparkle, Move still counts some major customers for its high-quality TV distribution on the web: ABC, FOX, The CW, ESPN360, ProSieben and Televisa.
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