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Joost Gets $45M Cash Infusion

Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 1:40 PM - by

Joost has received about US$45M from five backers, including financiers from Silicon valley, China and Europe, according to Reuters on Thursday. Joost has also provided a sign-up page.

"Index Ventures, Europe's top Internet venture capital firm and an early backer of Skype, is leading the round with Sequoia Capital, the world's top venture capital firm, which has financed start-ups from Apple to Yahoo to Google to YouTube.

"Joost, a year-old company that is the hottest thing in Internet video after YouTube, is seeking to do for long-form television programming what YouTube has done for short, user-created video sketches," Reuters reported

The key to Joost's success so far has been a robust security and business model that works with content providers instead of against them. So far Joost has signed deals with Viacom, CBS, Time Warner and some independent producers. It has also inked deals with 31 name-brand advertisers while still in the testing phase.

Currently Joost has about 150 channels. A special sign up page has been created by the Joost team. Interpersonal invitations are no longer required.

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Biff said:

member since 08 Apr 2004 with 1479 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 2:15 pm

Fight the power!

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iVoid said:

member since 10 Jan 2007 with 65 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 3:21 pm

"The key to Joost's success so far has been a robust security and business model that works with content providers instead of against them."

What success? They haven't launched except to beta testers.

They're successful in lining up content providers and sending press releases , but time will tell if they are successful in attracting users.

Microsoft was also working with content providers when they made their WMP DRM... that didn't quite work out for them.

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Spider said:

member since 12 Aug 2001 with 2997 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 3:26 pm

Joost is popular over at Fark, in the TotalFark discussions. In the past week there has been at least three threads a day for Joost invites alone.

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Biff said:

member since 08 Apr 2004 with 1479 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 5:46 pm

Hey maybe some of the channels on Joost will get noticed and end up being good enough to make it onto real delivery networks like cable! Honestly if most of the stuff was any good, wouldn't it already be on cable?

If Joost actually became popular enough, Comcast and friends would just create an alternative service and crush them. But I don't think it will ever get to that point. Why would I want to sit in front of my computer and watch crappy independent channels when I can watch all of the real channels on cable in my living room? Seriously. Where's the motivation? I just don't see Joost being anything more than a geeky fad.

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iJack said:

member since 13 Jun 2001 with 313 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri May 11, 2007 12:02 pm

As of this A.M., the link gets you to,

"We are sorry, but there are no more invitations left.

Best regards, The Joost team"

And BTW, Joost works only on Intel Macs (and PeeCees, of course), something rarely mentioned.

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