Why online television is going to be Joost the job

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Why online television is going to be Joost the job

The men behind Skype and KaZaA have designs on your viewing habits - and the advertisers will love it

Fancy a peek at Joost? Well, you'll just have to wait until the summer when the online TV service is due to be unleashed - but for some invited users, a beta of the service is already up and running.

The Joost service is already a fully functioning online TV network of around 400 streams of programming available to some 14,000 testers. TV over the internet is not new. What is new with Joost is the fullscreen image showing a high-resolution picture and full-length programmes.

Twitch the mouse and a control panel pops up. Under the row of on/off and volume controls is a second bar, "Joost suggests", directing you to any of 18 channels. Under that, a third bar reveals the programmes on the 18 channels.

Click on a start button and the show you have selected begins to play. A fourth tier of the control panel contains a search box for those tastes not catered for by the corporate selection.
Going live

When the service goes live - it's hinted that it will be at the end of June - it will be free with no subscription or fee. Crucially, the service is peer-to-peer. Choosing this delivery system is a smart move; Joost is a software house that does not have to bother with banks of servers gobbling money and needing maintenance. Its users take care of all that.

And that peer-to-peer (P2P) nature gives a clue to its origins. Joost is the brainchild of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who were behind the P2P file sharing service KaZaA and the P2P internet phone service Skype, which has attracted millions of users and was sold to eBay for £1.3bn.

The founders say that when it is up and running, viewers will have thousands of programmes to choose from on up to 100,000 channels. This sounds ambitious, but the founders' reputation is a formidable one. Zennstrom and Friis are on the A-list for this kind of innovation.

At this stage in the beta, the bundle of mostly mediocre telly programmes in their current offering seems to be technically credible. At the moment with Joost you can hop from tropical fish off the coast of east Africa to bad US-made comedies, and even a Russian film or two.

But Zennstrom and Friis have a surprise up their collective sleeve: they are not just offering TV. This is the internet, after all, and this is Web 2.0. Each screen has all of the functionality of a website and users can generate much of what goes on the screen.

So Trekkies could, for example, have a noticeboard at the top of the screen with a commentary, an instant messaging service at the bottom right and be simultaneously logged in to a chatroom full of other equally enthusiastic fans. If you then add the clock and the news ticker, there will barely be any room for Captain Kirk and his crew on the screen.

Joost has created the tools that allow others to fill in the content, explains chief executive Fredrik de Wahl. "Anybody who knows how to write a little bit of HTML will be able to take the elements and adapt them," he says. These onscreen elements are - perhaps unsurprisingly - known as widgets. They are firmly in the hands of the users, says de Wahl: Joost is not in the business of writing the content.

De Wahl says that with Joost's service, you can do anything possible on a website. "You can have competitions, you can have e-commerce. Whatever you do on websites you have the same freedom here." But it's early days: "We do not pretend to have worked out what all of these communities will like the most."

But if those communities of users have a good idea, they can create something and play it at no cost to see the reaction. If it helps keep viewers sticking to a stream, then ultimately it will have a commercial value. Unless the content owners say no, that is, and ban the interactive elements, which they will be able to do. There is an override: content owners who want to disable a widget can do so. If they do not wish any overlays on top of their product, they can ban them.

But "we are very much discouraging companies disabling the widgets because this is the future of television", says de Wahl. "It would be a shame. We have not seen any content owners doing that." However, this is hardly surprising, since the beta stage has barely begun.

Content is king and Joost recently announced that it was finalising a deal with Viacom, owner of Paramount, which seems to have netted the company the keys to the Paramount comedy vaults, allowing viewers access to thousands of hours of prime-time US comedies.

The deal was possible because Joost boasts a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform, and is guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.

The financial details of the deal were not revealed but they have said that all of the interactive elements will be enabled under the agreement.

Joost will make its money by creating what amounts to an individualised mass market for advertisers, says de Wahl. And advertisers will love the fact that there is no way for viewers to avoid the adverts - but, says de Wahl, there will only be three minutes of advertising in each hour.

That will feel like a terrific deal to US users, where prime-time TV can have up to 15 minutes per hour; less so to UK viewers, where commercial terrestrial channels can show between seven and eight minutes an hour. Satellite channels can show up to nine minutes of advertising in an hour in the UK.

Even louder music to the ears of advertisers is the fact that adverts will be targeted to each user, who will have to create a profile and log on to view programmes. The system will choose which adverts to show which user based on past viewing behaviour, so that someone with a penchant for blokey motoring shows will be spared nappy advertisements, while those choosing programmes about parenting won't get bombarded with messages about lads' mags.

De Wahl says advertising can be highly targeted - right down to postcodes. This means, for example, that in a heatwave a local supermarket could trumpet its ice-cream ranges.

He admits that it is an imprecise art; people have been known to fib about where they live when filling in registration forms. For example, he points out, more Skype users claim to live in the Bahamas than the entire population of the islands.

But by splitting the ad revenue with the content owners, Joost hopes to have uncovered a new goldmine in cyberspace.

Driving demand

If it works, might Joost begin clogging up the internet in the way that BitTorrent P2P traffic is accused of doing? De Wahl says no. It is services like Joost that are driving demand for internet service providers, he argues. After all, there is not much point in having an 8Mb-per-second download capability if all you are going to do is email the odd Word document to your office.

De Wahl is nothing if not confident about the potential appeal of Joost. It might, he reckons, even encourage people who don't watch much television to switch on the online box. That is because it will be tailored to you by you, not by schedulers in a broadcast centre. If you fancy 10 minutes of, say, global news, followed by a Dutch sitcom and then perhaps a local weather forecast, Joost will be able to dish that up to you.

Joost is used to causing upheavals in the internet world. If this online TV service has an impact anything like Skype or KaZaA did, then it could make a big difference to that box in the corner.









Tom Rowland
Thursday March 8, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
 
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