Allen WeinerJoost, one of the early TV 2.0 pioneers founded by the folks who brought free Internet calling to the world via Skype, has changed directions by moving its modus operandi from a heavy-install desktop download to a browser-based interface. According to reports, Joost will move to being a totally Flash-delivered application over the next months or so. Unless I am mistaken, that leaves only a few P2P-based applications such as Bittorrent as the only big-install TV 2.0 players. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to sense that the future of IP-delivered TV over the Web will favor those who take into account the fact that consumers like simplicity. TV junkies aren’t not called couch potatoes without good cause.
Re Joost’s move, I suppose the comment is, “It’s about time.” The company never got any traction in the U.S., and perhaps the alarm bells (or maybe light bulbs) went off when Hulu came on the scene and literally took over the TV via Web business with a focus on the consumer providing a host of social sharing tools, an impressive (and growing) roster of programs, a viable business model and a reliable viwing experience. That begs the question, is it too late for Joost? Unless they can come up with some new angle on programming that’s not same-old, same-old, the answer for now is yes.
But that also begs a question we’re examining within our research group at Gartner: who will control the TV 2.0 via the Web world? So far, we’ve whittled the competition down to Adobe (Flash, AIR, Flex), Microsoft (with Silverlight), Google (Chrome serving Rich Internet Applications) and Sun with it’s Java-based efforts. We’re currently in research mode; we’ll let you know what we decide. Stay tuned.
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Category: Publishing Uncategorized broadcasting Tags: broadcasting, Joost, Joost television broadcasting, Television
