Joost went to full beta this week, something that was met with barely concealed scorn by the majority of commentators for whom the service is now very much yesterday's next big thing. Reading the 30 or so comments on TechCrunch is a window on how people perceive the initiative.

Arrington: "They really milked the notion of a “private beta” to the extreme. To the point where I sort of lost respect for them, actually."

Comment #3: "There’s no Joost buzz/hype left anymore. They’re old news"

Comment #8: "I was an early beta tester … well … sort of … played with the app for about 30 minutes three times and did not like it. Removed it from my laptop and never looked back."

Comment #9:"I tried to use this thing a few times and it never really grabbed my attention. I have not removed it but have not used it for months"

To be fair, these are balanced by the odd positive response, but nearly two thirds are saying that they tried it, didn't like it and won't be going back. This is a sample and a very unscientific one at that, but what is clear is that after the Peak of Inflated Expectation earlier this year, Joost is now sliding rapidly down the Trough of Disillusionment. Can they rise up the Slope of Enlightenment to the Plateau of Productivity...? I don't know.

What have they been doing over the summer?
It could be argued that the Joost team have been beavering away, doing the dirty work behind the scenes to lay the foundations for a solid future. Clearly, they have been adding content partners - Major League Baseball stands out as one that offers fresh, niche content (to non-US residents). They have also done a lot of work on the interface making that more attractive and are evolving their ability to add widgets and link with the rest of the web.

All of which is good - if you ignore the expectations that were set earlier this year.

Check off the new content partners with their three month goals laid out in the leaked document earlier this year. Hmm... ITV: no. BBC: no. C4: no. I could go on, but it could be a bit embarrassing. Sure they closed MLB, but they weren't even on the list and if ever there was a sport that the US struggled to export, baseball is it (sorry Cuba). Has Joost become a dumping ground for rights that cannot be sold onto satellite platforms?

For me however, the major disappointment is the continued lack of a linear TV offering. Perhaps I don't get the idea of on-demand and am stuck in a timewarp, but I see on-demand as a catchup service complementing linear TV, not a standalone offering. What do I want to watch today? Do I really need to think about it?

A pregnant pause?
I have not written on Joost since the summer because there has been very little to write about. It has been very, very quiet... Volpi came in as CEO and clearly circled the waggons in preparation for this week's launch. From where they were (open, exciting and fresh) the silence was all the more notable.

It is to be expected when a new person comes into any job that they will want to review where they are and where they are going but this always risks losing momentum. Especially when the new boss has some different ideas of his own. Is what we are seeing a sort of horrible compromise?

As I said at the time, Volpi clearly sees Joost as a platform: "What Joost is, is a ... high quality ad-supported ... secure ... cost-effective delivery platform." Not the TV station that the concept started out as and what consumers have been led to expect. It is this expectation that is now fuelling the disillusionment because you probably cannot have it both ways.

Where to next?
In the platform model, you are not the be all and end all: you are not the end product. What you are is the operating system; something that needs a set of more exciting products that run over your platform. In Joost's case this is content. In Microsoft's case, this is Office and IE.

Joost as a platform offers a bridge between the content community and the networks. We can see where they are with the content community, what we can't see is where they are with the networks. If a bridge is not anchored on both sides, it falls into the river. Is this happening to Joost?

It is too early to say. What we don't know is what they have up their sleeves. If they can get to a point in 6 months time where they have anchored the bridge with a network provider or two - offering much improved performance to an ISPs subscribers (HD perhaps) - then the content side will follow. That is what I am looking for and why I am not yet writing them off.

The unexploited asset
The ad platform offers a huge upside over broadcast if Joost is inside the ISP because the ads can be matched to the subscriber base and deliver much improved hit rates. If they spend the next 6 months incrementally adding content and bug fixing as they have over the summer, they may well fizzle out.

They have to create the virtuous circle or they will be caught in the crossfire between content and networks. They are probably reaching the point on the content side where they cannot go much further without addressing the other side of the loop. They still have time, but they no longer have the time to market advantage that they had a year ago when The Venice Project was initially announced.

In all, it has been a bad week for Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. They may well have $530m more than they had at the start of it, but they have taken a beating on two fronts and their reputations have been damaged. Clearly they now have a bit more time on their hands to work on Joost...

This may be a good thing, it may not. Volpi has started down a path that is different from the one that Zennstrom and Friis foresaw when they came up with Joost as the son-of-Skype. It was expected that the duo would take-on the TV industry, but where they have found themselves is in a position where they have to work on the inside - supporting the needs of both content creator and network distributor. Are they all on the same page or is Volpi out on a limb? Only time will tell...

Labels: Joost

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Labels: Arootz, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, Joost, Veoh, video on demand

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Of course, any conclusions now are based on the current beta so if you are looking back on this article in a year's time, don't be surprised to find that what I say is now horribly out of date.

The BBC's service is very limited. It is riddled with compromises which detract from the end result and it's Kontiki P2P delivery is both a source of inefficiency and controversy.

And yet it is a start. A walk of a thousand miles and all that, but by taking the leap and putting the bulk of its programming on the internet, the BBC has opened a range of opportunities for the development of the service.

Kontiki's P2P is really not very good. It was very disorganised in comparison to Joost, which makes iPlayer and 4oD downloads slow to start and traces look a bit like kids bickering in the playground. I will be keeping an eye on peer hit ratios and will report back periodically on those as it is too early to draw firm conclusions on the amount of traffic that the BBC is offloading onto peers. But for now, talk is of underhand tactics.

Underhand? Yes - absolutely. My iPlayer is closed in the taskbar and yet kservice.exe is still running according to my task manager (Ctr+Alt+Del, Processes). Does it matter? Not to me as I don't pay for my upload but ever since I installed and tested 4oD I have experienced a significant increase in used upload capacity. If I was a cable customer, the extra bandwidth used on the coax might degrade everything for me and for my neighbours.

I deliberately slotted the Arootz article in the middle of this iPlayer articles because in that concept you can see how the BBC may be able to do it differently - multicasting to storage. If the BBC are committed to Kontiki, then they all have their work cut out.

As a user application, the iPlayer is inferior even to its 4oD stablemate because of the strange disconnection between where you select the programme - the web - and the application you actually view it on - the iPlayer itself.

It is all very different from Joost, Babelgum, VeohTV or YouTube. Those services are for live entertainment. The iPlayer is not - it is a catchup download service where you have to wait to watch what you want. The lack of progressive streaming is a big shortfall.

The addition of progressive streaming would make the service feel a lot more like TV. Furthermore, it would open the door to further development of the client software onto set top boxes, freeing the service of the chains that currently attach it to the PC.

I am not saying that the BBC is wrong to offer catchup downloads. It is a part of the product set that they want to end up with. Perhaps it is the low hanging fruit, but the final solution also needs to replicate and add value to the core broadcast model. Here too, there is work to be done.

Catchup Downloads has a number of avenues for development too. The capability will be very important in mobile TV where the cellular networks are simply too immature to offer anything like an acceptable experience for streamed services. Here, latent demand for mobile TV can be met by bridging the mobile handset and the broadband network, sideloading the media onto the device while the user sleeps. The iPlayer's current design provides this as a further development option, if nothing else.

But all is not lost - and that's why I issued the word of caution in the opening paragraph. As a service to me as a license fee payer, it is very good simply because it's got BBC programmes on it and not Channel 4s, Joost's, Babelgum's or Veoh's. It's attractiveness is directly proportional to the BARB figures which show the BBCs average viewing (for June) at 7 hours 24 mins against Channel 4's 2 hours 15 minutes.

In my service review, I wondered whether content was really king, and I think on reflection it is. What I think I've learned is that the application and the distribution network play a vital role in the shadows, they are the king-makers...

The BBCs royal aspirations are still alive and well after this release, but they really need to think about the people they are surrounding themselves with and whether they can get to where they want to be with the baggage they are carrying. I'm not just referring to Kontiki, the BBC is also weighed down by beaurocracy and that too is severely limiting the service.

If the BBC is serious about IP as a distribution technology for TV, and I believe they are, they need to evolve to a point where they simultaneously broadcast and offer up for time-limited storage their entire portfolio of programming. Quite what value they are creating by doing so is an interesting question given their unique commercial status - for competitors, the benefit is targeted adverts - but what does the iPlayer add economically? Something for another day perhaps...

Labels: 4oD, catch-up TV, iPlayer, Joost, Kontiki, P2P, video on demand

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Labels: iPlayer, Joost, P2P, timeshift TV, video on demand

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It's not even a month since the last i launch, but tomorrow sees the launch of another service that could disrupt its industry to an even greater degree than Apple promises to do with mobile telecoms. This time though, thankfully, we won't have to pay the homeless to wait in line for us to get hold of it.

The BBC launches the iPlayer tomorrow, but unlike the iPhone launch where all you could find was praise and hype, the BBC faces nothing but criticism, doomsday scenarios and even calls for a ban on the eve of it's big announcement. No wonder the folks behind it have decided to find pastures new.

The problem is that the BBC is publicly funded. It gets its money from everyone in the UK with a TV set because we all need a license to own a TV. The BBC's license revenue comes in exchange for a responsibility to deliver a universal service, free of advertising to anyone who pays the license fee. Foreign readers may find this curiously eccentric in the 21st Century, but the BBC is a national institution and we are British so that's the kind of thing we do.

This is where the problems lie. The license fee was designed at a time when the BBC was broadcasting: it had no competition in 1922 when the license was introduced to cover radio. The TV + Radio license was introduced in 1946. The Sky empire was still just a twinkle in the eye of James Murdoch's grandfather at that time.

The company (if you can call it that) is now operating in a very different world, but for many reasons (most of them sentimental), the BBC is still funded this way. As a result, it competes with other TV channels (and web sites) on an unequal footing because their funding model does not expose them to market forces.

Because the BBC is publicly funded, it has been free of the commercial pressures that competitors face on a daily basis. Has this given it an unfair advantage...? How many R&D departments would be given 4 years and £3m to deliver a project? Surely, anyone else in the same position would have lost the faith of shareholders well before now and management would be history. The BBC's unique position has shielded the iPlayer and given it breathing space in which to develop the service.

On the other hand though, how many R&D departments would face an Ofcom Market Impact Assessment, a Public Value Assessment, a full review by the BBC Trust and scrutiny by parliament before it could launch? The kerfuffle about the lack of service on Macs and Vista - there is a petition with 11,000 signatures with Downing Street asking the PM to ban it - is frankly pathetic. Do people really expect the BBC to be able to launch the service working 100% and available to everyone on day 1 with no testing?!?

Anyone who has ever been involved in product management will know that this is a recipe for disaster. The BBC cannot eat the elephant in one bite, but because of its funding model it will be forced (they might say "easily persuaded") to deal with standards issues like no other entity. The elephant will be consumed.

The Mac and Vista options might be addressed by making the content available through other media players as long DRM issues can be resolved. I suggested in my LUI Part 6 piece, where we described a prototype of the future of IPTV, these players are likely to include the likes of Joost. Because of its universal service obligation, the BBC is not in a position to say no.

The BBC's obligation extends beyond the internet however. For those without a PC, the BBC is investigating Virgin Media's on demand platform. This still leaves a chunk of people with no access to the service because of technology constraints on the user's side (no PC, no cable, no broadband).

Even though Freeview does not offer the bandwidth, the BBC is sure to get embroiled in how to serve these users, where other competitors would simply write off the niche as too expensive to serve. This is the flip side to the breathing space they have had to develop the service.

We already have video on demand from Channel4, an evolving service from Sky and a promised launch of a service from ITV that looks spookily like that promised by the BBC. So what's the big deal with the BBC's launch tomorrow? I've said it could disrupt its industry to a greater degree that the iPhone, so I had better explain myself...

Driver for IPTV Adoption
Ofcom's MIA states that by 2011, the iPlayer is likely to account for 3% of TV viewing hours, which doesn't sound like a lot. This is in fact about 45 mins per household per week, assuming total viewing remains as today at around 25 hours per week.

But, as with Freeview, the BBC gives this new(ish) technology the credibility to go mass market very quickly. There will undoubtedly be a knock on effect on all other broadband television services because there may not be a more trusted organisation anywhere in the world than the BBC. If IPTV is good enough for the BBC, it's good enough for me...

Looking closer at the Ofcom projections: 3% of total viewing is 9% of the BBC's current viewing. It would be reasonable to suggest that competitors services might grow in line with the BBCs. This would mean every household in the UK watching on average 2 hours and 23 minutes a week of IPTV by 2011. Over 3 billion hours a year...

Bandwidth
The MIA also says "The costs of the broadband capacity required to support the services could in aggregate be between £399 million and £831 million over the next 5 years." Once the capacity is there "the additional capacity would also be available for use by a wide range of other services, including commercial on-demand services, [so] it would not necessarily be appropriate to attribute the associated costs to the BBC services in isolation."

Ofcom's model says that the average capacity increase from the iPlayer will be 3GB per user per month by 2011.

Assuming that other broadcasters follow the same adoption curve, you are looking at almost exactly 9.5GB extra per user per month to serve the 9% of viewing hours at standard definition. This will add around 46kbps per user to an ISPs peak traffic load (approximately doubling what they have today). This is low, because I am using data that shows that early iPlayer alpha trial users had web-surfing-like peak to mean traffic profiles.

TV usage profiles tend to be much more peaky than web surfing traffic. Where you might get a peak to mean ratio on web traffic around 1.6, on TV viewing profiles, this looks more like 2.8. Cutting a long story short, this would push the traffic impact of the iPlayer from 46kbps per user up to around 81kbps additional traffic (easily tripling today's usage, from just one application).

Reverse engineering Ofcom's 3GB per user per month figure from the 3% penetration rate shows that they assume a 2Mbps encoding profile in their models. This suggests that high definition is not being taken into account.

If the BBC were to deliver at 1080p instead (as ABC.com in the US have announced they will), you might want to multiply the total capacity requirement by 5. With all content (ITV, Sky etc) as HD, the 9.5GB might be 45GB extra for every house connected to the broadband network. This would push the incremental peak load per user up by between 220kbps and 385kbps depending on peak to mean profile.

Money
Where there is demand, there is money, right...?

Actually, no. This is the other major problem with the BBC, the license fee and the universal service requirements. The BBC's iPlayer will not generate money from adverts (the BBC does not do ads), from subscription (the license fee already covers the service) and any other creative sources of income (including abroad), are likely to be relatively trivial.

This is not an issue for the BBC because the content is paid for already (its a catch up service of stuff already produced for broadcast). The service creation costs have been kept under control at £3m and rather than having to pay a big hosting bill, Kontiki's P2P client is being used, theoretically relieving the BBC of the burden of distribution costs.

The big losers are the networks who have to carry all this extra traffic and have no way of monetising it. This is again a BBC-specific problem because with other commercial broadcasters, the ISP is in a position to do an ad-revenue share agreement based on the unique element that the ISP can provide - the postcode. (We are going to come back to this point and the revenue opportunity from commercial broadcasters other than the BBC in LUI Part 10 early next week.)

The use of P2P actually makes the problem much bigger for the ISP. Historically, the BBC's web traffic, although significant, has been manageable via direct peering relationships between the ISPs and the BBC. Replacing this with P2P looks (to me at least) like a two fingered salute to the businesses that have to transport the BBCs product.

Summary
Even using the lowest results in the analysis, the iPlayer promises to double the traffic on the UK internet between now and 2011. On top of that the iPlayer opens the door to other broadcasters, which could mean that instead of doubling the volume of traffic, the iPlayer launch could drive an increase by tenfold or more.

I'm going to be watching the iPlayer's use of bandwidth very closely over the coming months. As I have done with Joost, Babelgum and 4oD, I will be running traffic source analysis and looking at where the Kontiki client gets its traffic from. Channel 4 also uses Kontiki, but using their service, I found that the scarcity of peers meant that much of the traffic was client server from the seed caches instead of actually using P2P.

I will be keenly examining the peer hit rates as that will determine the BBCs costbase. I will also be looking at where these peers are and whether BBC/Kontiki keeps traffic within the service provider's network or whether (like other P2P I have tested), in-country traffic source management is random. I will be publishing the findings here at periodic intervals.

If I can get the client from the website, the first set of data will be published here by lunchtime tomorrow...

UPDATE: no client = no data = no update. Sorry folks...

I got to the site by 7.40am, regsitered but have yet to receive the invite. I wouldn't say that the message board is on fire yet (10 ir so people grumbling about the same thing), but there are people who stayed up until midnight to register who are in the same boat.

They let Mashable in though, so if you are looking for a sneak peak that's the place to go. If you want a different perspective on possible adoption rates, I also found this.

IWR were able to run an initial test and reported that a 30 minute programme was 108MB, which suggests an encoding rate of 480kbps. It is not known what the download speed was, which may be different from the encoding rate to allow for buffering. The picture defaulted to 400 x 200 screen size, which sounds small.

More on this when I get my prized invite...

Labels: 4oD, Babelgum, catch-up TV, iPlayer, IPTV advertising, Joost, Ofcom, timeshift TV, video on demand

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This is part 6 in the Leeds Unbundled ISP (LUI) series that Keith McMahon and I are producing. The aim is to deliver a view on the commercial prospects of a hypothetical ISP, serving a niche community (Leeds in our example).

Before we can properly present the numbers though, we need to describe what those numbers are modelling. We have already looked at backhaul, staffing and our short and medium term product set. Today we look at the biggest variable in the future of our made up ISP: video.

IPTV is better for viewers than broadcast because it is truly on-demand. It gives viewers timeshift capabilities for BBC, ITV, C4, Five and Sky so that they can watch what they want on TV around the rest of their lives. So what is the variable?

While we are confident that video services like YouTube will continue to grow, we are not sure whether mainstream TV will successfully move online because of economic, marketing and technology challenges. IPTV is competing with established digital platforms (satellite, cable and freeview) that already penetrate 18m homes (more than have broadband). Getting mainstream TV online means replacing these distribution networks with the internet.

Consider the scale difference between the two extremes of service adoption: YouTube consumption is a few minutes at a time, a few times a week. TV is 25 hours per household per week. YouTube is currently 200kbps, IPTV as a vehicle of HD means 10Mbps.

There is very little that LUI can do to make any money from YouTube, but conversely, once we have our gigabit backhaul links in place, we are not too concerned about the cost of carrying its traffic. If they cranked up the resolution to the levels used by Veoh (700kbps), we might be a bit more concerned but as it stands, we are happy enough to carry the traffic.

What cannot be allowed to happen is for us to end up in a situation where we are a simple transport network for everyone else's broadcast-replacement services. Our commercial model, and that of every other ISP in the world, is based on carrying relatively small files (peak traffic over total users equals around 35kbps). TV viewing moving over to the internet and adopting HD resolutions will make this closer to 5.5Mbps (159 x the current dimensioning).

This needs to be paid for and the value is in the content: people buy music, video and TV. They don't buy bits and bytes. This means that we need payment for our bits and bytes bundled with the payment for the music, video and TV services. This means adopting a Fed-Ex model for superfast delivery of premium, newly released content and ad supported models for the rest.

Will this happen? Maybe, but only if the economics are right - we know that IPTV offers better functionality than broadcast because the internet uplink opens new doors for interactivity. With the public becoming disillusioned with telephone based interactivity on TV we think that the internet can rescue what had until recently been a popular genre of content.

Furthermore local loop speeds of 20M or so means HD at 1080p is practical and can be made available on demand. It's all technically possible but all these developments will only be attractive at a price point that is competitive with broadcast.

So where does that leave LUI?

Nowhere, right now at least. We just have a basic access service with some customers on CPS. Next up dev wise is the photo blog (due Q4 2007) and starting work on the softswitch (due 2008 perhaps). Enhancements to the photo blog and community stuff are mid 2008 launches.

We looked at buying in a wholesale IPTV service, even before we unbundled the access service. When Tiscali bought HomeChoice, we heard some suggestions that the HomeChoice platform would be wholesaled alongside Tiscali's LLU platform. While the attractions were obvious, the differential advantage was not, so we rejected that option.

More recently, we have looked at Iliad's platform and the service that Fastweb offers with a view to buying that in lock, stock and barrel. These are not currently deployed in the UK and although we could overcome the competitive issue to some degree, we just felt a little underwhelmed by the idea of taking something that had been done before.

LUI wants to do something a little differently and has to exploit our core concept: our localness. For LUI, IPTV has to be build around the community, but we also have to remember that it is still essentially a distribution network for mainstream TV that replaces the satellite dish, cable or freeview aerial in the home.

LUI's problem is that our customers can get all that from other operators, notably Sky & HomeChoice, so where we need to be different is in the EPG. We need to offer social networking in the EPG that exploits our localness and the social groupings within our customer base.

We are a network company and a small one at that, we need someone bigger to bring us the content. That means the content won't be exclusive so we have to add value to it another way. Hence the EPG and social network mashup.

That means things like the ability to recommend a programme to your circle of friends and comment on what you have seen, perhaps with an SMS gateway tacked on for alerts. When you turn on your EPG you see the linear TV option and the timeshift scroll back for the mainstream channels plus a Friends Recommend Channel.

We also have the Leeds Community Channel which will be developed before our IPTV service, but which needs evolve onto the TV when IPTV does arrive. The Community Channel is where local interest groupings (schools, community education, sports teams etc) can post virtual private videos to their members - much like the Iliad offer. All this is built on top of a core of content based on today's free local press.

We are already lobbying to force the publicly funded BBC content to be made available via public API so that anyone with a delivery solution can use it to deliver BBC content. The others are different because they are commercial entities, so why will ITV, C4, Five and Sky let us carry their stuff, sometimes in direct competition with their offerings?

Money. Pure and simple. They can get more from our subscribers if they deliver content via our network than they can via other means.

How? Because we know the customer's postcode and we can deliver that when we place the request for content. We also deliver the ip address of course, but they would get that anyway. With the postcode, they can then use Geo Mapping databases to paint a very good picture of who the consumer is, so they can use a) demographic and b) personalised advertising. They can't get this postcode without the ISP.

We could also consider sharing any special interest profiles that the user may create on our social network but this raises some ethical issues I suspect, not to mention the technical challenges.

But all of this needs to be pulled together: content, advertisers, client software, DRM and CDN. We are looking for one party to bring this to us. LUI's plan is to work with them and vice versa to prototype the future of IPTV.

The prototype is based on Joost, or Babelgum or Veoh (we haven't stitched it all together yet, it's just a plan). Something that runs on either an AppleTV-like STB or on the TV itself. Their job is to aggregate the content and provide us with an efficient distribution using P2P and local caching. They also handle all the advertising including the targeting and pay us a revenue share.

In order for this to work, Joost (or whoever our chosen partner is) must bring a deal with the major broadcasters. Joost does the deals with the content owners for us because they can and we can't.

Our BBC, ITV, C4, Five and Sky content comes through the deals that Joost has with them. Joost can pay better ad revenue than the producer can get by themselves from broadcast because we give them the postcode. As a result, they can target ads much more effectively. We get a rev share because we are adding value to their proposition.

Furthermore, we are solving one of Joost's problems - the EPG and social networking, which are currently lacking in their product - and we are leaving them to concentrate on their role as the IP TV operating system. We carry Joost's traffic and help them develop their intelligent localised P2P routing.

We provide the EPG (or at least our software partner behind the photo blog / community web stuff do that for us) and that has a two way API into Joost (or whoever). The EPG is our value add, our brand, our directory of content and the portal through which users can get to the array of services that we offer. Of course, they can go onto the open internet but with our gateway offering them RSS-based access to the world, we reckon that we can hold a fair proportion of the screen-time on our own services. Which is great for our ad revenues.

Of course this is all made up. LUI doesn't exist and there are holes in the plan and some very rough edges. With any luck though, this might give you a few ideas...

Part 7, back on Telebusillis is going to look at Hardware, which Keith will publish later this week!

Labels: Babelgum, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, ISP Products, Joost, LUI, next generation networks, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Back in April, when I was writing my original "Joost: analysis of a bandwidth hog" piece, I had no idea that the piece was going to make up 24% of my pageviews since then. It is quite possible that this had nothing to do with my writing and everything to do with the strategy secrets to be found in the link colmmac posted in his comment. Unfortunately, these secrets are now gone but you can read all about it here.

Whichever it was, it was clear that people were interested in how the application was behaving, so I updated the analysis in late May with my "Joost about on track" post that also looked at the wider strategic issues facing the company. My summary was that they were kitted up to play, but by no means certain of making the cut. They had (and still have) a lot of work to do on their EPG to improve what is a very static and "been there, done that" channel guide.

The content delivery network though was improving and this has clearly moved the company towards the concept of being "a high quality ad-supported secure cost-effective delivery platform" that works within networks rather than over the top. Their new CEO used to head Cisco's network equipment division, remember... Joost: the operating system for IPTV?

Now in mid-July, having run the analysis for a third time, it is clear that one thing that is working really well for them is the peer-to-peer network. Success here is measured in hard currency: the bill they pay their network providers (Level3 mainly, but also BT Infonet). What I am looking for in my analysis is the proportion of traffic that comes from peers versus the proportion that is served from these centralised locations.

In order to get my results, I am using Wireshark, which many readers will know as Ethereal. This allows me to see all the traffic on my LAN, and if I turn everything off except Joost, enables me to see what the application does when it is active.

What this shows is that for popular content at least, Joost has successfully offloaded the vast majority of traffic from its paid-for connections onto its free P2P network (free to Joost that is). In April's study 47% of bytes came from central servers, six weeks or so later on the 25th May I reported that this was at 18%. Results from 11th July show that this is now 6.7%

This popular content (the Fifth Gear Ferrari 430 Spider road test) is now well seeded, such that no one peer delivers more than 12% of the total file. There are some major sources: 6 peers between them give me 50% of what I am after and 14 peers account for 80%, but there is a long tail.


In total, there 99 IP addresses on 75 different networks in 33 countries delivering traffic to me.


From what I have seen, the network is now starting to prefer peers on this side of the Atlantic (possibly because there are just more of them now). Where in my May sample there was 39% coming from the US and Canada, this is now 4% in my July data. This is good news. Things are moving in the right direction.

So now that Joost's distribution capacity is seeded in Europe, expect to see this get more country specific to align with the network interconnection arrangements already in place. Serving Joost punters in the UK from other users in the UK means that ISPs costs are mitigated as they will likely avoid the most expensive routes - Transit.

But this is still only mitigation. The overall burden on the ISPs goes up with every Joost user that leaves their PC on even if the application minimised.

As I have mentioned before, Joost also uses the network when it is inactive (minimised), which I have questioned in the past. I don't know if this is new or if I missed it the first time, but the Terms and Conditions acceptance box now states clearly "I know that the Joost software will operate when minimised unless I fully exit the software".

Perhaps this is a necessary evil, but in a world where many people either have bandwidth limits or fair use policies set by their service providers, consuming someone's scarce resources for use by a complete stranger is still a big concern for me. This is where the house of cards could be vulnerable - you might give them a lift if you were going that way anyway, but would you let a stranger borrow your car when you are not using it (even if you were 100% sure you'd get it back)? Hmm...

Perhaps this won't be an issue. Certainly when I was sampling yesterday, I was surprised to find that the Joost application was not using my bandwidth when idle. Granted, this was yesterday morning around 11am so I can understand that demand from other users will be pretty low at that time - most people are at work of course and not watching Fifth Gear on Joost. I am certainly going to have to come back to this point and look again what is happening at peak hours.

I speculated in June that once the peers are well established, the file sizes can be cranked up to increase resolution and user experience. That time may well be approaching - perhaps when the service finally goes from the most well known Beta trial in history to being the real thing?

Having said that, to my untrained eye, the resolution already looks much better than it did in April. This might well be new codecs in the ever evolving software (the latest download is version 8 of version 0.10, so the guys there have clearly been busy). Whatever it is, the picture quality is now almost as good as standard definition TV. Not quite up there with Channel4's on Demand service (which uses a lot more bandwidth), but a lot better than Babelgum.

It does not look like this improvement has come by cranking up the bandwidth used by the application. My traces show that this is about where it was before, if anything the use may even be ever so slightly lower. The picture quality though is a lot better.

So that was popular content, what about the stuff that is buried in the Joost channel guide? Wow, do you have to work to find something watchable here? In fact I didn't watch it, I put it on, started Wireshark and went to make a cup of tea.

I chose the Community Channel because it seemed like the sort of thing that trendy Joost-heads would be most unlikely to be interested in. To be fair, the film was actually very well made, home made, but well made. It was about a couple of schools who decided to give their pupils a taste of the business world by letting them play Tycoon where they could design and develop a product for sale in their communities. Thankfully Peter Jones was nowhere to be seen.

So I was surpirsed when Wireshark revealed that this show about three very British schools, was coming largely from servers in the US. 68% of bytes came all the way across the Atlantic while almost all the rest was from the UK. The source networks? Level3 in both cases.

The aim of the experiment was to see how long tail content was distributed and here we have an answer. It makes me wonder (again) about the whole Long Tail thing. It is going to cost Joost an awful lot more to distribute this as it will be very hard to seed. They will be much better off if / when they get mainstream content on there that they can deliver as timeshifted linear TV.

My research has previously shown that on YouTube at least, the internet means that the richer get richer. The 20th most popular clip there had 18% of the views of the most popular, while the 20th most popular DVD rental generated 79% of the revenue of the no. 1 title. Humans like to follow the herd and social networking helps by showing the direction the herd is heading.

If it is far more expensive to distribute the unpopular stuff and demand for it is much lower (lower demand = lower prices), where's the business case? Time will tell, and I've been wrong before...

Labels: Joost, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Joost

There is really very little going on in the way of P2P on the Babelgum service. It is built in, but it needs the network to be seeded. The same was true of Joost when I took the above sample on 3rd April, although their peer hit ratios were better six weeks later when I went back to look at them again. I'll give Babelgum a chance here and reassess this point in a month or so.

In terms of content quality, there is more choice on Joost. Sometimes more is less and this might be a case here. The programming on Joost is very yoof - very hip. Just not very watchable unless you like burps, farts or loud music. The Babelgum archive has some interesting stuff that I have actually watched... Like the Turtle Treaty piece on how the inhabitants of remote islands revere, and yet end up eating, the turtles that they share their lives with. Not what I expected, but welcome nonetheless.

Another area in which Babelgum seems to have the edge is in the realisation that this is TV as well as Video, and that there is a difference between the two. There is clearly the broadcast angle built into Babelgum - look at the AP news channel for example.

The Babelgum interface is really clean and I think that also works better than Joost at the moment. I think maybe though the Joost one is more scalable somehow as the Babelgum GUI might restrict the number of channels you can track due to the amount of info on each channel that they carry.

There is also a different business approach. The Babelgum one is open, almost to a fault, describing the revenue share on ads up front for example. It seems like they are going to go straight for the second tier of no-name producers and give them an indie-platform. Joost are much more into the "household names" by the looks of things.

So which one wins? I would have to say that I prefer Babelgum, but that I think that Joost will win long term. The niche that Babelgum seems to inhabit with its programming and navigation is nice but that is an area that Joost can fix probably easier than anything else. Where Joost has the upper hand is in its impetus which is taking the company into the offices of the very biggest names in the industry. Joost is not really a service yet, it's a vision. It will either be successful breaking the status quo or it will be acquired to make sure that it does not.

Babelgum just does not seem like it can emerge (out of Italy) and break into the "not-invented-here" markets. Joost is making a big play for the US because it understands that the US is a thought leader and standards setter in the internet space. In the end, this is where I think both are heading - into the position as "the operating system" for internet video. Here they take on YouTube amongst others... Is there room for multiple O/Ss?

Labels: Babelgum, Joost, video on demand

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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...?

Labels: IPTV advertising, Joost, next generation networks, targeted ads

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Joost is a hot topic. It deserves to be. There are many things about the service that aren't quite right, but underlying it all are three key ingredients for success: big-name backing, excellent PR and efficient, adaptable technology.

Of course they have issues. The project has spent less than a year in the public eye and there remain three other factors threatening the success of the venture: programming, devices and networks.

The programming is not right somehow - perhaps they need to consider adding "broadcast channels" because finding what you want from a static list seems to ensure the content gets stuck in time. The first time you go there, you find one or two things of interest, but when you go back you are left trawling somewhat. It makes the whole experience too predictable.

But, the backing is in place to fix these problems. The number of content producers is already impressive, even if their offering isn't. No-one is putting their best stuff up there yet - it's early days. Viacom own Dreamworks, who produce a large chunk of the most popular kids movies. If you have kids, what price an online archive of all Dreamworks films, on tap? Its not there, yet.

Before that happens, something needs to be done with the channel guide to give it a bit more life. It is surprising that there aren't more "social networking" buttons. If it were easy to rate content, you could be sure that there would be more turnover and better filtering of the good stuff. Make it less miss and miss.

This can all be done. A bit further down the line though, they are going to have to face up to the device question, which is to some degree, out of their hands. I don't know that Joost are betting on the PC being the dominant, always on device in the home, but if they are, then they may be swimming against the tide. Everything is a computer now, there are processors in everything. This will surely mean that specialisation wins over generalisation - TVs do video and HiFis do music. PCs do publishing. Multi-purpose devices are for mobile users who have a premium on weight.

But this is where the PR can help. Here, even the screw-ups are working for them. Colmmacc posted a link to a set of slides he had produced on the network architecture on my last post on that subject. I hope he didn't get into trouble for this because it turns out that hidden beneath the visible layer on the PDF was a whole host of info on Joost's 3 month strategy goals.

This leak, just serves to increase the buzz about potential partners and shows that the team knows what they are doing. An example is the combination of US Soccer and Real Madrid as launch partners, showing a clear appreciation of the David Beckham PR phenomenon that is about to hit the US. It has been suggested that this leak was a Machiavellian PR exercise, which is almost certainly not true, but it shows how highly regarded "The World's Hottest Start-up" is that people are willing to believe that this may be part of the plan.

I just hope that this doesn't cause the company to clam up, because a big part of what is making the PR work is the open approach of the team. Openness always makes you more vulnerable to leaks of "sensitive information", but it also allows you to get on with stuff and build partnerships. The reverse is also true - if you are afraid of giving the game away, you don't give partners enough to make them want to join you in your adventure.

The PR is the way that Joost can solve the device problem they face. Just as Skype became the must-have bolt on to cheap IP phones, it is quite possible that a Joost installation could become standard on the television itself, requiring just an ethernet or wireless uplink before it is ready to go. Of course, a set top box could do that job too in the interim period. At this point, the platform becomes a de-facto standard for online video distribution, with anyone and everyone as possible paying customers.

Joost: YouTube for Professionals.

I can't see Sky liking that very much, but it gives Virgin, the BBC, ITV, C4 and the other content owners and distributors a way around Sky's possible IPTV content / network monopoly.

Which brings me onto the network, which is growing on the back of version 0.10's For Friends offering. It seems that there is quite a bit more content added and a few tweaks here and there, but the programming remains as was. The main development is that there is a lot more advertising with discrete logo hyperlinks displayed throughout whatever you are watching.

The P2P hit rate that they seem to be getting is certainly improved over my earlier analysis, at least for the popular items. Level3 seems to be taking full responsibility now for the seed network, there is little or nothing now from the Infonet Luxembourg centre that there was a few weeks back.

On the "Most Popular" clip of dudes surfing in Hawaii, only 18% of the traffic came from Level3, and there was a broad distribution of 8 peers who between them delivered a further 74% of traffic. 66 other peers gave me the remaining 8% of bytes. When I did the same, while watching Rockie + Bullwinkle (not the most popular...), I found that there was only one peer hit, delivering 15% of bytes, but leaving 81% to the Level3 network. Only 4% of bytes came from the remaining 56 peers in that sample.

There is no crunch point yet, but if traffic does grow (still an if, given the programming issues), changes need to be made to the way in which Joost works with the networks to route the packets more efficiently. The huge amount of tromboning that currently takes place needs to be addressed by the networks as well as by Joost (this is a link to colmmacc's slides minus the "secrets").

Joost's card in this gambit is its efficient, adaptable technology. Used in the right way within a network, it offers an extremely powerful publishing platform offering the ISPs using it a potential differential advantage. That level of integration is very hard to do however (for the ISP more than for Joost, I suspect) for an ISP fighting a price war. Joost may have to wait a little before going down this road.

Alternatively, they could launch a guerrilla war against the networks. Of course they'll say that they won't, but it might not hurt the service providers to think that a possibility. Joost could entirely disintermediate the network from the video value chain.

But like I say, all this talk of global domination is a few years away, and it will not happen until Joost addresses the core programming and makes the service something you watch, rather than something you play with (as you do today). Toys get boring after a while.

Labels: IPTV advertising, Joost, next generation networks, video on demand

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