Joost Partners With Meebo
Joost, the desktop-based long-form video service that aims to take on the old TV model with a large pile of venture capital, is scrapping one of its defining features built in-house, inline chat, and replacing it with outside chat service meebo.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joost has packed a lot into 2007: a $45 million round from Sequoia, Index, CBS and Viacom in May, then dropping the invite wall and opening the client to everyone on October 1 after beta testers griped about reliability and usability. Now it is dismantling one of its few built-in differentiators — inline chat — handing that layer to Meebo just as competitors like Brightcove close the gap on full-screen broadcast-quality P2P video.
For Meebo, the deal caps a strong year: the ad-supported Meebo Rooms launch in May, followed by its late-October Platform opening to outside developers, with Joost becoming a marquee desktop embed. Notably, Sequoia Capital backs both companies, so this is also a portfolio wiring itself together rather than two strangers striking a deal.
First-order effects
- Joost's users get Meebo-powered chat in place of the in-house feature, and Meebo gains distribution inside a heavily funded desktop video client at zero acquisition cost.
- Joost's engineers stop maintaining a social feature they no longer own, freeing headcount while its core P2P delivery advantage erodes against Brightcove-style rivals.
Second-order effects
- The shared Sequoia investor makes the partnership structurally cheap to strike and repeat — expect more cross-portfolio integrations between Joost and other Sequoia-backed web services.
- Meebo's ads-and-platform strategy gets its proof case: if a flagship client like Joost embeds Meebo rather than building chat, other media and community sites face lower friction to do the same.
Third-order effects
- If consumer internet services keep swapping in-house modules for best-of-breed third-party components, competitive moats shift from feature completeness toward content rights and distribution reach — the direction TechCrunch gestured at when arguing that embedded Joost would change the market.
The trend: Late-2000s internet video and communication startups are shifting from building every feature in-house to assembling composable third-party platforms, competing on content and distribution instead of feature breadth.