What Went Wrong With Joost? | Hacker News Reader

What Went Wrong With Joost?

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51 pointsmattjung25 comments

Joost died because it didn't do what it said it did: Let you watch TV on the internet.

It let you watch little snippets of things you weren't interested in. I downloaded the client because I lived in Spain at the time without a television. I tried to use it a few times, but there was never anything on it worth watching. Certainly no network television. None of the sports that it promised. Basically, nothing at all to watch.

Then Hulu came along with a thing that let you watch TV on the internet. The rest is history.

I think that´s that´s the point !

I was all excited about Joost when the first stories about it were circulating on the net. I signed up for the beta. And waited. And waited.

Then I could finally download the client (that's another strike in itself), then discovered it wouldn't run on my older hardware. That's when I gave up.

Hulu had a much shorter private period, much laxer signup rules, and didn't need a dedicated client player.

Really, what went wrong was that Joost didn't get the content they needed.

Sure, one can quibble that they didn't act like a startup or that people didn't want to download a player and wanted to use their browser, but really it just didn't get content.

Hulu, while not taking anything away from their impressive execution and reliability, owes most of its success to Fox, NBC and others putting loads of content on it.

"In the end, however, it all boiled down to a lack of content." Last sentence in the article and a fitting conclusion.

Except it's not really a "fitting conclusion" to the article: almost all the other factors the article cites are irrelevant or inconsequential. "Too big, too fast", "Too spread out", and so on are just quibbles: the fundamental problem was a lack of compelling content. The rest is just incidental, IMHO.

Isn't Joost older? Shouldn't Joost have negotiated for rights to that content?

Ultimately this was the difference between legit Napster and iTunes Music Store. Jobs made the negotiations, got big media to feel comfortable and got the damned content.

Founded in March 2007, Hulu is co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Providence Equity Partners.

That's from Hulu's media info page. I think it boils down to: the networks trust themselves with their content. They aren't going to trust an outside company founded by people who made their name of pirated content (the Joost founders are the Kazaa people). Frankly, why give someone else the profits when you can create your own content distribution system? Hulu gives them both the control and the revenues.

Note: I'm not making a moral judgement on pirated content, merely explaining a possible thought process of the networks.

Hulu did a really good job with it as well. I think if Hulu's execution was poor, Joost would have had a much better chance at survival.

...they didn't have anything compelling to watch. I tried to enjoy it but beyond a few music videos there really wasn't much there. I think they had a plan, they were trying to execute it but at the end of the day you either buy, borrow, or steal the content.

I think it's sad that Viacom was one of their investors but did not offer up any of their back catalog. Being the largest media company on the planet, even if they gave them their B-grade shit it still would have been loads better than what was available on joost.

Joost sounds like one of those companies that's created just to get VC money and get sold to someone gullible.

If the founders had truly wanted to build something that helped their customers, they could have done it without $45 million in funding, as they had when they created Kazaa and Skype.

I don't think they had sinister or non-genuine intentions; I think they were deluded by their previous successes that this would be a clear win, and went fast into it without considering the obvious (to us now, at least). They were mistakenly trained to think that P2P was their technical-advantage hammer that they could hit every nail with.

Joost is a good example showing that buzz, money, and fame can't beat good content. Content is still king.

While I don't entirely disagree with that, it should be pointed out that Hulu has also executed. It's not like it is "Hulu with content and no execution" vs "Joost with execution and no content", and then a fight to see who wins. It sounds more like "Hulu had content and execution" and "Joost had neither", and that matchup doesn't really provide any object lesson to anybody beyond the rather obvious "You really ought to bring something substantial to the table".

Am I the only person that thinks their silly name didn't help?

OK, lots of sites have silly names, but whereas Hulu had a big ad campaign to make sure you knew it was pronounced 'hooloo' rather than 'huhluh', Joost is just confusing.

I assume the correct pronunciation is like 'juiced', which makes me wonder why they didn't buy it (juiced.com is just parked with generic ads). Maybe it's because I'm European, but whenever I see the name, I can't help reading it as 'Yoost' (this is how it would sound in Dutch, and the company is Dutch). If I were Latino, I might read it as 'Hoost'.

It just doesn't feel comfortable...talking about it with a friend over the phone last year went like this:'-You spell it j o o s t. - Say what? -like boost with a j. -oh...that's stupid'. I realize this seems like a trivial complaint, but I think there's a fine line between a clever name that uses the momentary 'huh?' reaction to become memorable (eg google), and one that just creates confusion.

Great article overall, and a cautionary tale of what can go wrong with the 'just do it' approach.

Content was just one part of the equation. The larger problem was that Joost assumed people would download a client, after all they did it with Kazza & Skype. By then, the dynamics of the consumer had changed (thanks in large part to you-tube) -- people didn't want to download software to watch videos.

Just because something worked for you in the past, doesn't necessarily mean it would work in the future. Joost could have done a plug-in similar to flash/silverlight that was a one-time download, this plug-in could have done all the things their download client would have done.

Hindsight, of-course is 20/20. It will be interesting to see what else they build using the core from JotID.

I don't think the client interface was the "larger problem" at all.

Their client was a one-time download, just like the plugin you suggest. I downloaded it, installed it, and then after that it was really never a considered decision again.

While some people think "the browser" is the universal client for every conceivable app, I think that is far from realistic or optimistic.

And I can almost guarantee you that if Joost had a client you needed to download every single time you wanted to watch something AND put in a 12 character alpha-numeric key BUT had an in depth library of high-quality content, people would be gladly using it today.

I tried Joost for a while after I got an early invite. The stand-alone client and associated bugs and quirks never mattered to me so much as the fact that there was nothing compelling on Joost to watch.

After all, iTunes is a client you need to download once. Hasn't hurt Apple a bit.

the sales numbers for television shows on itunes would beg to differ. I don't deny that installing the client was part of the problem, but not a huge one.

Content == key.

If all you can get are some unknown documentaries, odd irrelevant 24hr news bulletins, wannabe mtv channels then you're pretty much dead from the start.

Hulu ...offered higher-quality video and used content from its backers, NBC and Fox

'nuff said. The rest is a laundry list.

Keep one eye on Joost. If Hulu gets too popular they could leave themselves open to accusations of anti-competitive practices and forced licensing of content to other vendors at equivalent rates, at which point Joost will have an advantage as a company that already has the infrastructure.

The founders are just focused at earning money in my opinion. They realized that what is most important at the business world is earn money very early. They moved away from the initial concept of startups to a more like enterprise thinking. Different worlds with different priors. A startup focus on product, an enterprise on investors. And the most important thing, a huge part of the game comes from luck, but most part of the initials tend to think that it´s all about their skills, and, because already did before, they can do again ... it´s not like that. It´s not just about your skills, but about luck too ... so what they need to do is just shut down that try and start the next. Ouch ! But there´s a problem ... they are no an startup, they are an enterprise so they have to act like that, they need to do what they do instead, so they probably have to stick with the mistake until the end.

The client ran like a dog on my machine, and was some kind of rainbow interface. Bizarre!

There was nothing to watch...

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