Now they’re entering the world of TV. Last week the brains behind the online telephony service introduced Joost, which claims to be the world’s first broadcast-quality service on the Internet. Although no precise launch date has been set, the site, joost.com, is currently operating in order to inform prospective customers of the service’s potential. Joost CEO Frederik de Wahl, a Swede who previously ran a peer-to-peer software business and who holds a master’s degree in both electrical engineering and economics, held a press conference last week in London to announce the service. NEWSWEEK’s Ginanne Brownell spoke to him by (old-fashioned) telephone. Excerpts:
De Wahl: We believe the television experience has a high entertainment value–people like television and spend massive amounts of hours watching it. We bring that concept online. When you start our application you get full-screen media, you get broadcast quality–in some cases, better, because we [offer] DVD-like quality–and you get the channel structure. One show follows another. You can also flick between channels in a very televisionlike way. We mimic what is good about TV, but we remove the drawbacks of television, like locking people into time and place. It’s a one-to-many broadcasting model, while we have a one-to-one relationship. You can also individualize the targeting of advertising and programming.
Watching a U.S. show in Europe is absolutely possible if the content owner allows that. The content owner is in full control of the content. By default, [our] platform unlocks distribution on the Internet so anyone can access it, but the content owners may set rules around the content that makes it available in certain regions, because in some cases they do not own the rights.
The MySpace analogy is spot on. We want those who do not have distribution outlets today to be able to distribute their material. But, that said, we will not allow self-uploading where just anyone who wants to do this, can. We offer top professional tools for content owners to upload content. We have seen two problems with self-uploading systems–quality issues and infringement issues. So you will have to identify yourself, you will have to fulfill certain guarantees that this is actually your content, that this is not something you have stolen.
Say that you want to go to your friend’s and watch programming. You don’t carry your digital box over to their house. Joost allows you not only to do time-and-place shifting but also to be in control of where you want to watch and how you want to watch. Others will see the content that they like the most and sit back and flip through different channels, so it is different for different viewers. It will be a market for parallel systems–much like how Skype coexisted with traditional cell-phone and fixed-line telephone offerings. Our goal is to make as many people as possible appreciate the entertainment value.
The business model is in media advertising, like regular television advertising. It will be free to download and to publish on the platform. The advertising inserted in the content is what fuels the system with money. And then there is the revenue share between us and the content owner, so they will make money from the advertising as well. We charge a delivery fee for content, and we have an option for the content owners under which we can fill the advertising or they can sell it themselves. This is a unique offering that many content owners appreciate because the big networks have their own sales staff–they do not want to give up their advertising revenue.
We do not allow you to skip ads. We have to respect that there has to be money on the system. But we reduce the noise and the annoying experiences. People who do not like advertising say it is intrusive or negative, but there are many examples of people who appreciate it. Fashion magazines are good examples of that–60 percent of these magazines are advertising, and many of the stories are product placement. People buy those magazines just for the ads.
