Joost now offers their beta to anyone who wants it
For anyone wondering what all the hype has been about, the upstart online video-sharing service Joost, founded by the guys behind Kazaa and Skype, is now available to the public. The site claims to have more than 15,000 TV shows and 250+ channels. Which is all well and good, but once again we find ourselves in the “drinking from the fire hose” situation. How are we to differentiate between what we consider signal, and what we consider noise?
The main “What’s On” page has a secondary feature of a conversation with Don Mattingly. The big draw is Babylon 5.
Now don’t get me wrong. I kinda dug B5 when it was on; the lantern-jawed humans and the elaborate prosthetic aliens squaring off each week made me nostalgic for Star Trek. Hell, they were Star Trek, only updated to a vision of the future where we don’t have to live with the endless series of planets whose landscape, for some reason, all looks like Vasquez Rocks, CA.
But if this is what you’re coming out the gate with, in your attempt to prove that you’re an alternative to the YouTube juggernaut, well, you might have wanted to wait for a bit. I do see that CBS is doling out some crumbs – Letterman’s Top 10 list makes an appearance, as does CSI and some WB and Adult Swim content. Connecting all the dots, there seems to be a real effort here to push Viacom’s stuff. Now, since they struck a distribution deal back in February, I can understand wanting to take advantage of it.
But when 90% of the push on the landing page is to the one big media brand that you’ve managed to curry favor with … well, it strikes of desperation. If you’re going to try to live up to the promise of the whole “many to many” communication paradigm, it might be nice to, well, demonstrate to your audience/supposed content producers that their efforts will be rewarded. As in, have an upstart, decent quality viral video featured on your front page. Otherwise, what’s to differentiate you from one of the Viacom family’s home pages?
I’ll be clicking around on Joost for the next couple of days, to see if there’s anything there that hasn’t already been done to death, or that might be of interest to the burgeoning viral indie video producers that I know who are looking for a place where they can monetize their intellectual property (and yeah, that description does also apply to me, so I’ve got some skin in this game too).
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