Joost v. Babelgum
Babelgum has pushed itself public yesterday. On the surface it looks very similar to its more famous competitor, Joost. Both are P2P IPTV applications that let you flip through channels and shows streamed to your computer. Both are backed by deep pockets and big names.
Context & Ripple Effects
Babelgum's public push lands about a month after Joost closed a $45 million round pairing Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures with content owners CBS and Viacom plus Li Ka-shing — financing explicitly framed as backing global expansion. Joost's strategy under CEO Mike Volpi is to route internet TV around the cable operators like Comcast and Time Warner Cable he once sold networking equipment to at Cisco.
The timing matters because Joost's beta is still gated and fragile: the company apologized in early May 2007 that it could not grant service invites because the application would not launch, and a separate unconfirmed report claimed three months of Joost's deal plans leaked through hidden metadata in a presentation PDF. A second deep-pocketed P2P IPTV player arriving now hands content owners an alternative at Joost's weakest moment.
First-order effects
- Joost stops being the only well-funded P2P IPTV platform courting broadcasters; CBS and Viacom, already Joost investors, now have a rival bidder for their channel lineups.
- Users stuck outside Joost's invite system — or stuck with its error-prone May build — get an openly available alternative client to evaluate.
Second-order effects
- Exclusivity-by-invite becomes harder to defend once a near-identical product is public, pressing Joost to stabilize its build and open access faster than its own roadmap assumed.
- Studios and networks negotiating P2P streaming rights can play Babelgum against Joost, raising the price of first-window content for both.
Third-order effects
- If similarly capitalized entrants keep appearing, P2P IPTV turns into a land-grab decided by content licensing and distribution deals rather than by peer-to-peer engineering itself.
- A market deliberately built around bypassing cable operators like Comcast and Time Warner Cable positions the broadband pipe as commodity transport — the structural challenge implicit in Volpi's Cisco pedigree.
The trend: Internet television is becoming a contest among heavily capitalized P2P platforms racing to lock up licensed TV content ahead of any response from cable incumbents.