The Clock is Ticking for Joost
There's a time bomb out there with Joost's name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streams—the main selling point of Joost's peer-to-peer Internet TV client software—is quickly coming to the Web. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joost spent 2007 building a walled garden: an invite-only P2P client whose pitch was full-screen, broadcast-quality TV that the browser couldn't deliver, with coverage framing it as a two-horse race against Babelgum and speculation that embedding Joost would change the market. On October 1 it dropped the invites and opened to everyone — but beta testers had already griped about reliability and usability ahead of that public launch.
The threat TechCrunch flags is that Brightcove, which narrowed its focus to video technology last month after bowing out of the YouTube viewer race, plans to give its publishers the same full-screen broadcast-quality streams using BitTorrent DNA — BitTorrent having just bought uTorrent weeks earlier. The one thing only a downloaded client could do is about to run inside a web page.
First-order effects
- Brightcove's publishers gain P2P-backed full-screen streaming with no client download, directly undercutting the installation hurdle that defines Joost's model days after its October 1 open launch.
- Joost's core differentiator — quality the Web supposedly couldn't match — evaporates at the exact moment it needs mass adoption to justify its content licensing spend.
Second-order effects
- BitTorrent repositions from consumer torrent brand to infrastructure vendor, monetizing DNA across third-party platforms — a distribution lever its uTorrent acquisition set up.
- Other web video platforms face pressure to adopt similar P2P delivery or concede the high-bitrate end of online video to Brightcove-hosted content.
Third-order effects
- If embeddable P2P delivery becomes table stakes, competition in internet TV shifts from transport technology — where Joost, Babelgum and Veoh all built clients — to content rights and publisher relationships, favoring platform businesses over destination software.
- A structural squeeze emerges for standalone TV clients: their value depends on exclusive content, since the viewing experience itself is now replicable in the browser.
The trend: Peer-to-peer video delivery is commoditizing into embeddable web infrastructure, shifting internet TV competition from client technology to content and distribution.