The Future of Joost Holds a Public Release, But What Else?

Joost, the P2P TV application from the inventors of Skype and Kazaa, has now announced that more than one million users have signed up for its video service, which is still in beta testing and available by invitation only.

Niklas Zennström, Skype CEO and Joost co-founder, said at a recent Skype press event that the service should be launched before 2008 arrives. No specific date was announced, but he did say that "the plan is that the service will be fully launched later this year."

Joost first launched in late 2006 and was formerly known as 'The Venice Project' before changing names. Joost recently received $45 million in funding, which had previously been primarily provided by its founders who sold their Skype VoIP service to eBay in 2006. So far, the service has also managed to sign "around 30 Tier 1 advertisers" and a number of content providers according to Zennström. Will this be enough big names to yield a big audience, big profits and a successful business plan?

The biggest obstacle for Joost to overcome will be ensuring that video content is delivered quickly without too many interruptions and pauses in video playback on the user end. In my testing, this problem still plagues the service which also seemed quite bumpy on machines with slightly older hardware. Joost already encountered a problem when its servers were hit with substantial traffic increases, shortly after all Joost users were given unlimited invitations.

It will be interesting to see how well Joost is accepted once it exits the beta testing stage and is unleased to a public audience. Some think it will be a YouTube killer while others are wary of those claims. I am sure that it will develop some loyal followers, but to me it seems to take away some of the freedom you have with web 2.0 viral video sites like YouTube. There is a much wider variety of content to choose from on YouTube and most of it does not take nearly as long to load nor is it as hardware-intensive as Joost can be.

Two of the main things that it will come down to will be ease of use and how interactive the user experience is. Zennström stated that, "ease of use is such an important thing for us… Ultimately, you want everything as simple as possible." As for interactivity, Henry Blodget, of Silicon Alley Insider, put it best this way.

"Most online video viewers don't want to 'watch TV' online–they want to do stuff they can't do with their TVs, such as click around, viewing one-to-two minute clips, reading some text, seeing some static pictures, and then clicking around some more."

I couldn't have said it better myself. What do you think the future holds for Joost? Leave your comments and thoughts.