Is Joost headed for the deadpool?
It's been awhile since I wrote about Joost, but the sudden departure this week of the company's chief technology officer — which started out amicably and then became a firing — made me want to take a look at the company again.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joost entered 2008 as a cautionary tale in reverse motion: the Kazaa/Skype founders' Internet TV venture was hyped through 2007 as real TV on the Web and an expected YouTube-killer, but the run-up was rough — beta testers flagged reliability and usability problems before the October public launch (Joost Is Error-Prone), and the service finally opened to everyone in early October (Hello Public).
The week's news is that the chief technology officer has left, in what began as an amicable exit and ended as a firing, and Silicon Alley Insider ran the obituary-flavored take the same day (Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen: Joost Edition). Whether that means a deadpool entry is speculation at this point — unconfirmed — but the technical co-architect's forced exit lands on a company whose core technical claim is already eroding.
First-order effects
- Joost must replace its top technology executive while its founding engineering premise — full-screen broadcast-quality P2P video as a proprietary edge — is being matched by competitors like Brightcove adopting similar delivery technology.
- A forced (rather than amicable) CTO exit raises retention risk for the rest of a senior team recruited during the hype cycle, when Joost could offer 'hottest online video startup' as part of the package.
Second-order effects
- With Brightcove and others closing the P2P quality gap, Joost gets pushed into competing on content relationships with traditional networks — who praised it at launch — rather than on transport technology, raising its content-licensing costs just as its negotiating leverage weakens.
- Earlier signs of build-versus-buy retreat, like scrapping in-house chat for a Meebo partnership in November, suggest more features will be outsourced, shrinking what remains distinctive about the client itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 2007's class of heavily hyped, capital-rich video startups faces a structural squeeze: once generic web delivery matches P2P quality, the winners are whoever holds network content rights, not whoever built the cleverest distribution layer.
- For investors, the Joost arc — hype peak, buggy beta, feature retrenchment, executive firing — becomes the template for how quickly a 'hot' startup's valuation story decays when the technical moat proves temporary; whether it reaches the deadpool is still unconfirmed.
The trend: Internet TV is shifting from technology-driven differentiation toward content-rights-driven competition, stranding P2P-first startups whose moats evaporate as mainstream web video catches up.