Mike Butcher

Joost is hiring talent scouts Creative Artists Agency to get Hollywood programming onto its service. Along with well known programming and a clutch of top advertisers Joost wants to offer shows from independent professional video makers rather than “wild” UGC/social media. Joost has $45 million from five backers and signed Viacom and sister company CBS for content recently.

The online personalised music streaming service Pandora has signed a deal with US carrier Sprint to be pre-installed or downloaded to handsets. Pandora and other web broadcasters have been heavily hit by recent increases in the licensing fees for web broadcasters in the US. Pandora has also had to stop streaming outside the US. The new Sprint venture means a badly needed extra revenue stream on top of advertising. Pandora says it has 6.9 million registered listeners. Pandora founder Tim Westergren says if the new royalty scheme stays then the business no longer makes sense.

Joost, the online television service from Skype and Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, launches today. Current beta testers will now get an unlimited number of invites, after being limited to five till now. A number of leading advertisers including Coca-Cola, Nike, General Motors and Visa will start ad campaigns this month. The latest version is available for download from existing users and those invited to join. While most of their content provided is aimed at US and UK audiences, there are plans to expand to Asia and Latin America. Let’s see how far they can get with PC-based TV before some bright spark invents the Joost TV plugin.

In a great article about Joost, The Guardian’s Owen Gibson looks at the main points behind the services. Jost will “split” the signal so it cannot be pirated, and there will be no user content until copyright issues are sorted out. Joost also lets you construct your own channels and will pull together all the available car content and “schedule” it into a bespoke channel for you. You can chat to other users watching the same channel, have a news ticker running along the bottom of the screen, or access online content provided by the broadcaster. A key quote from Fredrik de Wahl, Joost’s chief executive: “I haven’t seen anyone who has fundamentally redesigned what they do and integrated the content-owner needs or the advertiser needs or the viewer’s needs into one platform. We’re unique in that we get what viewers want – the end-user attraction, the simplicity of use.” Don;t believe the hype because we haven’t seen what Babelgum.com is capable of yet…