Joost Is Error-Prone
Apologies to all of you who've requested invites to Joost. We'd love to let you into the service, but over the past few days we have had trouble launching the application ourselves. I'd had no problems running earlier versions, but these days can't even get the thing to start.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days ago Joost looked ready: it announced its commercial launch and let every beta tester invite anyone, ending months of invite scarcity. Today the company that just opened the gates is apologizing that it cannot honor new invite requests at all — the current build will not even start on machines where earlier versions ran fine.
The stumble travelled unusually widely for an apology note: Wired's Epicenter ran the same story under a 'still broken' banner, meaning Joost's first broad press moment is framed as dysfunction rather than exclusivity. It also follows a March report of font problems running Joost on Apple TV, so the launch-window build is failing on desktops and set-tops alike.
First-order effects
- The May 1 decision to let all beta testers invite anyone now floods a build that fails to launch, turning Joost's own distribution mechanism against it: the people most motivated to try the service are the ones hitting the error screens.
- NewTeeVee — a site covering Joost closely enough to have requested invites for readers — cannot get the application to start, so the trade press documenting the launch cannot demonstrate the product working.
Second-order effects
- The freshly invited cohort's first experience is a crash rather than a demo, converting exactly the users the invite program was meant to recruit into skeptics whose word-of-mouth shapes the public-launch narrative.
- With syndicated coverage amplifying 'broken' as the launch frame, Joost's engineering team faces pressure to fix stability before scale, since each additional wave of invitees multiplies the number of failed first runs.
Third-order effects
- If reliability does not catch up with access, Joost's invite-scarcity marketing model inverts: the brand becomes associated with instability precisely when it needs mainstream credibility for its commercial launch.
- More broadly, the episode illustrates how 2007-era internet-TV startups betting on heavyweight desktop clients face a reliability cliff at open launch that lightweight browser-based video rivals do not — client quality becoming the competitive axis as distribution opens.
The trend: Consumer internet-video services moving from closed-beta hype to open launch are discovering that invite-driven buzz collapses fast when client software fails at scale.