From the guys who brought us Kazaa (one of the first music sharing networks) and Skype (the first large-scale Internet phone service) now comes Joost. If you think YouTube is big, you’re five minutes late.
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom created Joost to bring TV to the Web in a serious way, not like the jumpy-jerkism often plaguing Internet TV now. And not the amateur YouTubed funniest home videos look we are familiar with, either. Joost will stream like digital silk in real time like, well, like TV. So why not just watch TV then? 50,000 channels, that’s why.
Unlike YouTube’s user-generated content where we might see a guy smack a can of WD-40 and fireball himself into a cursing backflip, Joost only shows network-quality programming. However, like YouTube, it’s free. There are ads poked in every hour. That’s why it’s free. The ads pay for the programming.
So let me get this straight, the programming is brought to us for free but we have commercials interspersed. Okay, now I get it. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So after pop-up, annoying banner hell, the Internet has gone back to a tried and true advertising formula? Can you say commercials? Bill Paley is smiling somewhere.
When Joost gets up to around 50,000 channels, that means commercials will be extremely focused on specific activities for that particular channel. Which means copywriters and art directors can keep their jobs a while longer. It was touch and go there for a while with all the new technology and digi-gurus prophesying the death and dismemberment of the commercial specifically, and advertising in general. I guess we’ll have to predict the death of some other profession.
One thing is sure; it won’t be media planners and buyers. With 50,000 channels, somebody is going to be busier than a mosquito at a nudist colony. There will be channels from other countries and channels for specific things like quilting and transgendered karaoke. There will even be channels for certain shows, all the time. The American Idol Channel, The Seinfeld Rerun Channel, The Apprentice Channel and The Lost Channel.
We may all get our own channel. Stay tuned for Shirt-Tucking With the Stars on The Fred Channel.
