Former Joost CEO Gets New Gig as VC
Former Joost CEO Mike Volpi already has a new gig lined up. He’ll be a venture partner at Index Ventures, which was part of the group that pumped $45 million into the little web TV startup that could (but didn’t).
Joost announced last week that it was changing focus from offering premium content in order to become (yet another) white-label video provider. As part of that strategic shift, Volpi stepped down as CEO but remains chairman of the company. Volpi has a long history with Index as he invested $10 million in the firm’s first fund while he was an exec at Cisco. According to the press announcement, Volpi will be “based in the London office as part of the venture team where he will lead early stage investments in the Internet, telecom/networking and media sectors and contribute to the firm’s later stage growth fund.”
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.
Joost Adds Widgets, Metadata API to Its Flash Player
Joost has announced that it is going to allow third-party developers to add Flash widgets to its video player soon. The Joost Labs blog this week previewed a widget that adds keyword-based Twitter search results to a video. Joost wants to eventually release a widget API that will expose some of the underlying video’s metadata and make it possible to integrate these widgets within the Joost Flash player.
This isn’t the first time Joost is toying with widgets. The company’s P2P-based video application also featured a widget API, but few wanted to develop for a player that had no user base. However, Joost has clearly been thinking about how to make widgets work in the past few years, and some of these ideas could lead to interesting results.
Joost Now on Your PS3 (Minus Big Content Partners)
Joost Labs launched a version of its web TV service for the PlayStation 3 today, making it accessible on your television set via the game console. Well, making some of Joost’s content accessible on your PS3 — just not anything from Viacom, Warner Bros. or CBS.
To launch Joost, PS3 owners select the Network icon on the PlayStation, open the Internet browser, press start and enter http://labs.joost.com/tv/ in the address field. The navigation has been optimized for the PS3 game controller.
The Joost news comes just a day after research from In-Stat predicted that game consoles would remain the dominant delivery mechanism for web video on television sets through 2013. The migration of newteevee to oldteevee is one we’ve been keeping tabs on here, and it looks like Joost has run into the same hurdle Boxee and Hulu.
Studios and networks are all for putting their content online, but they don’t want it to be an end-run around traditional TV operators, giving people a reason to cut their cable cords. This attitude resulted in the official removal of Hulu from Boxee, and when Hulu recently released its desktop app, it expressly forbid running it on anything other than a PC.
We don’t have a PS3, so if any NewTeeVee readers out there do, fire up Joost and tell us how well it works.
Vid-Biz: Joost, Firefox 3.5, Cabonauts
Joost Gets 12 New Content Partners; web TV service to get content from Marvel Enterprises, Speed Racer Entertainment, and TOEI Animation, among others. (release) In other content partner news — Metacafe Adds TV Hub; section will be feature clips from television programming from CBS, TBS, TNT and the CW. (The Wall Street Journal)
Firefox 3.5 Makes Video More Like Web Pages; the browser’s user of open-source video standards open up new interactive possibilities. (TechCrunch)
Erin Gray to Be Casting Director for Hayden Black’s Cabonauts; former Buck Rogers star will bring the roster of celebrities she reps as part of her Heroes for Hire booking agency. (release)
Boomers Spending More Time Surfing Web than Watching TV; new research from Changewave finds the older set are spending 12.9 non-business hours each week surfing the web and 11.8 hours watching TV. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Is a TV “Family Hour” Dead? TV execs gather to discuss how DVRs and new technology platforms have made the idea of families gathering at one time to watch television a thing of the past. (The Wrap)
Joost Boldly Goes Where Hulu Wouldn’t
Independent developer Paul Yanez, who seems to make a game of adding functionality to web video platforms whether they like it or not, has built an Adobe AIR app for Joost called the Joost Media Player.
This is delightfully ironic for a number of reasons.
- Back when Joost was a peer-to-peer app, Yanez built a proof-of-concept of a web version of the video portal.
- Later, Joost went all-web, dropping its error-prone software, and making it more competitive with the ease of web-based Hulu.
- Yanez had built a similar AIR app for Hulu (since it’s web-only) called MyMediaPlayer2, which Hulu blocked six times, the latest time in March.
- Where Hulu blocked Yanez, the Joost creative and engineering teams actually collaborated with him on the Joost Media Player. Yanez says Joost will also be promoting the player on its own site.
I gotta say, I just downloaded and started using the app, and it was far less painful than using the original Joost software ever was. But in a twist away from Joost’s recent social strategy, Joost Media Player doesn’t even include the user accounts and newsfeed-oriented social viewing system that Joost has emphasized on the web; rather, it solely gives users the option of tying into their Twitter feeds to report to friends what they’re watching. Yanez’s app also has remote-control viewing enabled, though I haven’t tried that yet.
Vid-Biz: Swine Flu, Sezmi, Nielsen
How to Recognize Swine Flu Symptoms; new video from CDC is among the many posted in response to the outbreak. (YouTube Blog)
Sezmi Aims for a Fall 2009 Commercial Roll Out; launch pushed back six months as the set-top box company optimizes the user experience and ties in with the holiday season. (VideoNuze)
Nielsen: People Aren’t Using Our TV Ratings Equipment Properly; company says that the more people present in TV ratings households, the more likely they aren’t reporting accurately; national TV ratings could have been understated by 8 percent. (MediaPost)
Sony’s Crackle Launching Two New Web Series This Year; from Kevin James comes the stuntman comedy Dusty Peacock; the other series is The Bannen Way, about a con man. The site is also adding 100 guy-oriented movies from Sony like Spider-Man 2 and Stripes. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Slate Takes on Hulu; comedic bit pokes fun at the site’s ad options. (SlateV)
Rumor: Losing Juice, Joost Looking to Sell
Joost is looking to sell itself and become an online video platform for cable or satellite operators, with Time Warner Cable supposedly interested, according to an anonymously sourced article at CNET. When asked about it, a Joost rep provided us with a “we don’t comment on rumors” email.
Joost CEO Mike Volpi wrote a post on the Joost blog yesterday outlining just how shiny everything is on the site. According to the post, site traffic is up nearly five-fold since relaunching the web-based Joost.com service and there were 15 million video views in March. Volpi closes the post with:
“[N]othing, not brain-eating aliens, not cats on skateboards, and not rumors and speculation, will keep us from continuing on our mission to bring video to you over the internet. In the afterglow of the hype of our early days, we’ve had our fair share of critics, but we’re encouraged every day by the amount of feedback emails, tweets, Facebook comments and more that we receive from our fans.”
Vid-Biz: Blockbuster, Rotten Tomatoes, Windows Media
Coulda Been: Blockbuster Was Going to Get Into the Operator Biz; former exec explains how the movie rental chain was going to roll out video over DSL in partnership with Verizon. (All Things D) And while Blockbuster endures a far less glamorous fate, Redbox moves into Manhattan. Company installs two DVD rental kiosks in the largest U.S. market, one in the Walgreen’s at the Empire State Building, and one at One Times Square. (Variety)
Rotten Tomatoes Show Debuts Tonight; movie reviews and info show will run on Current. (Digits Blog)
Windows Media Center Adds Sports; launching today on Windows Vista, Microsoft has content from Fox Sports, CBSSports.com, and MSNBC, including recaps of March Madness. (CNET)
Joost Partners with Netlog; agreement with Europe’s leading social networking service will let Netlog’s audience watch Joost content. (TechCrunch)
Less Than 4 Percent of U.S. Homes Not Ready for DTV Switch; since mid-February, more than 500,000 homes have prepared for the June 12 transition. (Nielsen Wire)
Ustream and Skyfire Enter into Promo Agreement; live-streaming company to endorse the mobile browser; Skyfire will make Ustream a featured bookmark. (jkOnTheRun)
Vid-Biz: Plex, Joost, China
Watch Hulu on Your TV through Plex; those bummed over Hulu’s departure from Boxee may want to try this other XBMC-based project. (Zatz Not Funny!)
Joost to Use Ooyala on Backend; video publishing service will provide ingestion, transcoding and metadata management tools to web TV site. (release) Liz broke this story last week.
China Central Television Launching Online TV Station; CCTV.com being created to compete with other video portals and help the government maintain control of the media. (Variety)
Microsoft Technology Stitches Together Mobile Video; from its research labs comes an ability to turn various mobile videos into one large panoramic video. (TechCrunch)
CBS Opening Up TV.com Internationally; it’s a small step, but audiences outside the U.S. will be able to watch clips of Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Star Trek and 60 Minutes. (Contentinople)
GTalk Worm Traced Back to San Francisco Man; ViddyHo.com registration information lists Cam-Hoan Ton-That and HappyAppy, Inc. as registrants. (The Harvard Crimson)
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