BloGiza

Joost!

Holy crap! Joost has just announced that it has raised a whopping $45M in its first institutional round. Investors include Sequoia and Index, as well as CBS, Viacom, and a Chinese billionaire.

Also, they are going into open beta very soon.

My thoughts:

1. If I hadn't mentioned it before, holy crap!
2. This answers my question of how CBS plans to compete with the NBC-News Corp Internet venture.
3. It will be really interesting to see how these projects deal with scaling effectively once millions of users tune in. P2P works more or less fine when it comes to transmitting audio (i.e. Skype); let's see how the architecture handles video.
4. I'm so jealous that Sequoia always gets in on these projects

Behold the future of television, folks. You can tell your kids you were there in the early days.

The revolution will be televised

Gil over at De Gardener has posted videos of a talk that Jeff Pulver gave about two weeks ago at the last Garage Geeks event.  Pulver talked about his vision for the future of television. And that future resides on the Internet.

Much of Jeff's speech revolves around the idea of using RSS as a delivery platform. Which isn't too surprising, since he is currently very involved with Network2, a new Internet venture that seeks to aggregate all the independently produced episodic content on the Web and create a kind of uber-television network for it.

In the last couple of months I've been immersed in the New Media world. It seems that after years and years of hype about TV and the Internet coming together, it's starting to happen. Joost is the highest-profile example, but there are literally dozens of companies working on becoming the NBC (or Fox, or Comedy Central, or whatever) of the Internet.

As I see it now, no one group will emerge as the 800-lb gorilla of the space. There is too much content out there and -- at least in the realm of top-tier content -- a lot of gorillas already competing with each other. What I think we will see are a number of different classes of television broadcast online:

• The Big Kahunas -- These guys will be serving up professionally produced, premium content to the widest available audience. This includes not only episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives, but also the latest Shakira videos, as well as re-runs of Happy Days. As mentioned, Joost looks like it will be a major player in this category as doubtlessly will the still-unnamed NBC-NewsCorp project
• The Middle-of-the-Tail Guys -- Here you will find episodes of independently produced shows like Ask a Ninja, Chad Vader and Jeff's favorite, Feed Me Bubbe. Not to mention thousands of other examples of people doing their own series. The content will likely be shorter-form and not quite as slickly produced, but my feeling is it will manage to find an enthusiastic audience. Network2 is looking to dominate this category.
• One-offs and amateurs -- The traditional realm of YouTube, Metacafe, and their ilk. You want videos of cats playing the piano? This is the place for you.

Of course, these categories are far from fixed and rigid. I expect we will see a lot of overlap between the players, not to mention various other broadcast models such as live vlogging. However it plays out, it's going to start playing out soon. And as soon as it does, the ad dollars are going to start rolling in that direction.

Joost Update

I've been playing around with the beta of Joost (nee The Venice Project) for a couple of months now. Or should I say playing around as time permits and otherwise smugly enjoying being an early adopter.

At any rate, it seems that the general public will soon have a chance to experience it for themselves. The company has announced that it will be moving to open beta at the end of the month. In addition, Joost has signed some major advertisers and will be adding some new premium content from Sony and Turner.

My thoughts at the moment:

• Everyone expects Joost will be a huge success. In fact, it's almost taken as a given. Which, if you take a step back and look at the situation objectively seems a little bit odd. After all, we're talking about a paradigm shift in the world of televised media which brings with it tremendous risks both technological and business. But I guess after Kazaa and Skype, Zennstrom & co have enough magic pixie dust to allay all fears.
  
• There is some decent content on Joost right now, but the majority of their programming doesn't speak to me. There's a lot of music content, some independent films, and some documentaries. Perhaps I'm older than the target demographic and that's why I don't connect.
  
• IMHO Joost will need to get a lot more popular mainstream entertainment before it can really take off. There's a lot of good independent content out there, but I don't need a dedicated application to access it. (I would go to Network2 or other competitors). The newly announced deal (which includes programming from CNN and Adult Swim, as well as old episodes of "Charlie's Angels") is a step in the right direction.
  
• Having said that, it will be interesting to see what kind of premium content they manage to get. Will it end up being a repository for old TV from the '70s and '80s? Would that be a bad thing if it happened?
  
• Joost also needs to work on its UI before it becomes ready for prime time. After three months I still find it awkward to get things done, including fairly simple operations like finding the list of all available channels and exiting the application. And if I have a problem with it, I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to my mother-in-law if she tried to use it.

Venice Project gets a New Name

From today no longer should one say "The Venice Project". Rather, the new service has been given the new and official name Joost.

(Personally, I liked the old name better. But that's neither here nor there.)

Joost has been getting a second round of coverage in the techie media this week, including Wired's rather good profile of the service and its founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström. The gist of the article is that Joost is good for TV because it provides two elements that are key for making the transition from broadcast TV to TV over the Net: a reliable and efficient P2P delivery platform, and full security/copyright protection.

I've been playing around with it a bit this week and hope to have a more in-depth posting on the service soon. Initial reaction: As far as an Internet-TV service, it's almost there. The UI is not where it needs to be, and the content is a little music video-heavy for my personal taste. I would hope that Janus and Niklas manage to resolve both quibbles before Joost is ready for prime time.

And, for everyone who has been asking, I don't really have any invites to give out at the moment. Sorry.