What Went Wrong With Joost?

Posted on July 1, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Om very succinctly yet thoroughly lays out what has led to the demise of Joost. One point that I disagree with my good friend Om on is that a white label strategy is the last refuge of a failed strategy when you don’t set out from the beginning to become a white label business… Brightcove has done well white labeling streaming video services.

When I read about all the planned changes at the company earlier today, the first thought that crossed my mind was: Stick a fork in it; Joost is done. After all, this whole white-label video strategy is like a leaky lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The NewTeeVee crew sums up the situation very succinctly: “Becoming a white-label video provider was what a business did when all other strategies failed.”

[From What Went Wrong With Joost?]

I’ve written about Joost a couple of times since it launched in 2007 and my experience apparently mimics that of what the broader majority of their users experienced. The service began with great enthusiasm among consumers because at the time it was apparent that Youtube had reached an apex in terms of quality and distribution of feature content. Joost promised to improve on both and the video experience itself was pretty damn sweet and given the early phase of the company I was willing to be patient on the content front… yet mainstream feature content never arrived and the result was that there was no reason to stay with the service.

At the end of the day Joost was a content business but they never seemed to understand that, which is reflected in their management team which strategized around a technology roadmap. In many ways Joost is a textbook example of so many things that a startup should not do, and whatever strategy they have now is tantamount to capitulation because as Om so aptly puts it, stick a fork in it. Done.

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