Jaman, now playing on AppleTV
Given YouTube's control of the snack-video market, it is no surprise that attention is shifting to long form, professionally produced content. Joost, Babelgum and scores of others are chasing this market, betting that MTV Summer Break might make compelling viewing on your PC.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after TechCrunch framed the race for online long-form as a head-to-head between Joost and Babelgum — two PC-bound players betting that professionally produced programming like MTV Summer Break belongs on the browser-era screen — Jaman has taken a different route entirely: putting its catalog on AppleTV, the device sitting in the living room rather than on the desk.
The move matters because YouTube's grip on snack-length clips (described here as outright control of that market) leaves the long-form, professional-content segment as the open battleground of mid-2007, and the entrants are splitting by screen: Joost and Babelgum on the PC, Jaman now riding Apple hardware into the television.
First-order effects
- Jaman gains living-room distribution without building its own set-top box, reaching viewers through an AppleTV install base it does not have to sell hardware into.
- AppleTV's value proposition shifts slightly from an iTunes accessory toward a general portal for third-party long-form video services, with Jaman among the first non-iTunes catalogs on it.
Second-order effects
- Joost and Babelgum, whose strategies were compared directly just weeks ago as PC plays, face pressure to answer on the TV screen or concede the living room while they fight each other for desktop attention.
- Content owners holding long-form rights gain a widening set of bidders — P2P startups and device platforms alike — improving licensing leverage against any single distributor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, online video competition consolidates around distribution endpoints — devices and software clients — rather than destination websites, forcing every catalog owner to be present wherever the viewer's largest screen is.
- The snack-video-versus-long-form split could harden into a structural divide, with different platforms, business models, and rights economics for each format rather than one winner-takes-all video site.
The trend: Online long-form video is fragmenting by screen — PC-native players like Joost and Babelgum on one side, device-attached catalogs like Jaman on AppleTV on the other — as challengers position around, rather than against, YouTube's short-form dominance.