Joost

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:44pm on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

On June 30, 2009, Joost CEO Mike Volpi announced at the Joost Blog that the website is changing its mission:

"Today we’ve decided to make some changes at Joost. In these tough economic times, it’s been increasingly challenging to operate as an independent, ad-supported online video platform. In order to position ourselves well for the future, we began investigating additional lines of revenue for Joost.

After much analysis, we have decided to change our focus and to start providing white label online video platforms for media companies and distributors. We have built a solid technology platform that there is demand for in the marketplace, and look forward to this new chapter for our company. At the same time, we’ll continue to operate Joost.com and its associated video applications.

Unfortunately, as a part of this change, we will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends. This is obviously disappointing and sad – it’s never easy saying goodbye to coworkers, especially when people have poured so much of their time, talent, effort and emotion into a company. We appreciate the contribution that all of our employees have given to Joost, and wish them well in the future.

Thank you for all of your support."

In the reorganization of Joost, Volpi will step down as CEO but will remain chairman of the board. Matt Zelesko, Joost’s senior vice president of engineering, will be the new CEO.

Heather Sickels    Boulder, CO

Posted at 11:11am on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Joost is based on P2P TV technology, P2P stands for peer-to-peer. It is expected to offer near-TV resolution images, turning a PC into an instant on-demand TV. P2P TV technology differs in the sense that the servers serve only a handful of clients, each of the clients in turn propagate the stream to more downstream clients and so on. This moves the distribution costs from the channel owner to the user. News updates, discussion forums, show ratings, and multi-user chat sessions are made possible through the use of semi-transparent widget overlays.The Joost service is ad-supported, with advertising similar to traditional TV. The web site currently has about 40 advertisers, including Sony Pictures, BMW, and Sprite. These ads are injected video-advertisements and additional interactive advertisements as overlays and pop-ups.

Heather Sickels    Boulder, CO

Posted at 11:10am on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

NEW YORK AND LONDON – DECEMBER 16, 2008 – Joost today announced it has added nine independent music labels and aggregators to its ever increasing content library. There are now more than 18,000 music assets – including music videos, interviews and live performances – available in the Music section of Joost.com