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Joost is not a TV station
By jpenston | June 5, 2007 |
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“What Joost is - a … high quality ad-supported … secure … cost-effective delivery platform.” Mike Volpi, officially now the new Joost CEO.
The edit is mine (you can read the full interview at GigaOM), but Volpi seems very clear that they are a platform for content owners first and foremost.
Since I first tried the service, I have held a certain amount of scepticism about whether Joost is really the consumer-play that some might believe it to be (like Skype, is it the centre of the experience?) My scepticism surrounds the fact that although you “buy” Joost, and you see the Joost interface, Joost is not really why you are there. You are there for the content. Unlike how you Google a word or you Skype someone, you don’t Joost a TV programme.
Janus Fris on his blog, describes Joost as meaning “great quality Internet TV”. That was back in January, when the Venice Project became Joost, so perhaps this evolution towards a service provider model shows how they have refined the concept over the last 6 months since its early Beta testing days.
The big success of these tests has been the P2P network by all accounts. I have seen this in the improvements between the two snapshots I have taken of their peer hit ratios (in April and then about 6 weeks later in May). My tests suggest that between 5 and 10 peers is enough (at current resolutions, which are poor) to take the load off the Joost Level3 hosted servers. In other words, it won’t be long before the bulk of distributed content is an optional (performance enhancing) cost to the company.
I wonder whether Joost is actually more of a technology-play (the Intel inside model or even operating behind the scenes as the internet equivalent of SES Astra and Eutalsat birds to deliver Sky TV and others)?
Those comments from Volpi increase my suspicion that Joost sees itself as the latter, but is hedging its bets and getting itself off the ground by acting as the former. Perhaps Volpis experience at Cisco is telling also: “Most recently, he headed the company’s $11 billion division that builds network equipment for telecom companies and network providers”, Total Telecom.
Is the company going to take on Sky as a multi-channel “channel” or will it link up with the Murdochs as a delivery partner for Sky Sports? The comment from Volpi on Apple TV (a tie up that I think would be a mutually beneficial move), seems to indicate that Joost might well be preparing itself to act as the aggregator network and not the retailer.
In that position in the market, Volpi’s background with Service Providers might again be highly relevant. He is better placed than most to diplomatically (and technically) solve network bandwidth issues by working with the major networks to minimise traffic tromboning. He knows network providers and he knows networks. He was at Cisco…
By controlling the distribution platform, Joost is in prime position to adopt the responsibility to aggregate and target the adverts to individual users. Joost will know far more about each of its users’ preferences than will a dumb broadcaster (without the internet uplink), so they will inevitably be able to get more £s per user per second of airtime than would Sky or others. For sure, the content-co will get a large share of revenue and may even get more than they do today because the ad value will be so much higher.
Two words for anyone who thinks that being a wholesale platform is a low margin business: Bill Gates. Is Joost an application or is it a potentially ubiquitous operating system…?
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Topics: IPTV advertising, Joost, next generation networks, targeted ads |