Joost launched last year to quite a bit of fanfare. Heck, even I was excited. I once thought they had it in the bag. They had a slick player, were nearing a million users (a tough number to hit for a download), and were even backed by Viacom, CBS, and Sequoia.
However, the market’s changed considerably. First, Hulu launched and was a lot better than expected. Second, Adobe announced plans to incorporate a slicker codec. Now Joost is finding content deals harder to come by.
These kinds of difficulties are nothing new. We’ve seen them before in online music amongst deals between the large record labels and online vendors. In that case, as in the case of online video, it appears that publishers are calling the shots. However, they haven’t been in complete control. In a large part, pirates have forced their hands. Piracy has in large part been democratized by the arrival of user friendly media distribution channels like YouTube, Deezer, or any number of other streaming media services.
In fact, I’d argue that online, media publishers are more in competition with pirates than each other. There’s plenty of demand for high quality media content online and pirates have no qualms in supplying it. Comedy Central had its own fight with YouTube over Daily Show clips until it finally put everything online on its own site. The same has played out for a multitude of other shows including South Park, which also finally got it’s online counterpart.
While publishers can’t beat pirates on price, they can win the audience back with quality and user experience. But make the ads too annoying or obnoxious and users will flee back to pirates. Publishers can make large libraries of their content easily searched and in high definition. I get a sense that all online media will move toward points of aggregation. For music, Steve Jobs hopes it’s iTunes. Hulu has the potential to be the same for television. There will likely be a few other syndication partners as well.
