[Posted by Nick Thomas]
The news
that Joost is scaling back its plans for world domination to focus on developing
white label services is not a surprise. But it is a marker of sorts, given that
back in the day Joost was a poster boy for a new kind of mid-form online video
destination that would flourish in the perceived gap between YouTube, with its
skateboarding cats and ad-unfriendly farting fratboys, and the old media
dinosaurs wedded to distributing their prized content on TV. Sadly, the game moved on.
So what lessons can be learnt from Joost’s
experience? First of all, it took the wrong decision by asking users to
download client software. As iPlayer discovered in 2008, users want streaming:
it turned out the appeal of YouTube wasn’t just the content, it was the instant
click and play experience. Joost changed to a streaming model – eventually - but too late to engage the audiences who had
already discovered iPlayer and Hulu.
The media business is still about content,
and those who have spent millions of dollars creating and acquiring it are not
inclined to let someone else distribute it online. The likes of ABC, NBC/Fox
and the BBC (as well as smaller brands) built their own online video platforms
to deliver content direct to consumers. At the other end of the spectrum,
YouTube started to clean up its act while experimenting with longer-form
content. Joost got squeezed out.
But it was mainly about the C word –
Content. Joost just couldn’t get the content users wanted, so they couldn’t get
a scaleable audience, which mean they couldn’t afford the content, and so on.
They struggled to persuade rights holders to give them the killer content
brands users wanted, and clearly found the world of international rights to be
a circle of hell. To which older heads
in the media business might have said, welcome to our world.
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