Joost has become the new Hulu, the online video company everyone loves to hate. Unfortunately for them the criticism comes after they launched, but Joost has two critical things going for it: advertisers love it, and as a result content owners are involved.

If Joost runs itself into the ground it will have only its management to blame. They have the financial backing, market presence and technological know how to turn things around, but to do so they will need to focus on their core competency: providing a better user experience than any other service.

For now Joost needs to forget about P2P, forget going global, and focus on building a platform which is technologically above and beyond anything else, which meets the expectations of the wide range of users consuming content online and delivers a better value exchange for both users and marketers.

This means moving beyond the downloadable player, though there is still a place for it, putting users in control, and pairing advertisers with content in innovative ways. Once they do this the legit content deals will follow, the users will follow, the scale for P2P and an international presence will follow.

It is no easy task, but it’s Joost’s last remaining chance to differentiate themselves. User experience is what they built their product on to begin with and if they can’t deliver on that then they’re already done.

Joost refuted a report that they are preparing for a “major retrenchment,” but they sure can’t push a consistent message. The new company everyone loves to hate (remember when it was Hulu?) has said somewhat different things to a number of different people.

The company told c21 media “the report was ‘false and baseless’ and the company would make announcements in a couple of weeks that would ‘more than refute that.’”

Well, good, now we can look forward to weeks of speculation.

I was going to write a quick and dirty guide to BBTV, Blinkx’s new downloadable player, but unless they took a bunch of features offline overnight, most of what they claim in the announcement isn’t yet available in the initial release, (or for none of the content I viewed.)

Blinkx describes BBTV as:

A significant advance in online television that leverages blinkx’s patented speech and visual recognition technology to simultaneously deliver a high-quality television experience over the Internet, and link it to the universe of information on the Web, adding dimension and context to the viewer’s experience.

And it claims to do so by integrating search, “speech-based navigation” and “automatic web linking” which would draw in different forms of media, make discovery simpler and more rewarding, make advertising more effective and make it a unique platform for consuming video.

For now, it’s a shell of what it will become, which is to say, currently nowhere near competing with competitors like Joost or Zattoo in terms of quality, content or interface design. If you’re eager to try it wait for version 2.0, whenever that may be.

Have you used BBTV or any of these features? Drop us a line below.

So said Pando Networks CEO Robert Levitan speaking of the collaboration between Pando, Yale researchers and Verizon at the DCIA’s Inaugural Market Conference in New York.

P2P has come a long way since the Napster days. Progress shown by the fact that telcos are now engaging with P2P companies for the mutual benefit of users and business. The need for collaboration was a recurring theme of the conference. Said Eliot Listman of PeerApp:

People think the bandwidth is free…a service provider is providing the bandwidth, content owners are starting to deploy peer-to-peer, however those content owners are now concerned [because the] service provider could block it. All this politics and [talk of] regulation brings to the front that it’s a business relationship that has to grow.

Which is what the P4P Working Group is all about. Back in June of last year, I attended the first New York P2P 2.0 Meetup, organized by Laird Popkin, CTO of Pando Networks and attended by Verizon Senior Technologist Doug Paskin, in which Yale PhD student Haiyong Xie presented his research on the benefit of “Proactive Provider Assistance for P2P.”

The P4P Working Group grew out of the ensuing discussion, a collaboration between ISPs, P2P providers and Technology Researchers to “accelerate distribution of content…and optimize ISP Network resources…to provide the best possible performance to end-user customers.”

Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee has more on the specifics of the technology, but the short story is that ISPs by implementing a mechanism through which they can communicate with P2P about network status and policies can ultimately benefit from customer use of P2P in a big way.

And the Verizon field trial results are compelling:

• P4P enhanced download rates for FTTH averaged 205% the speed of unmanaged P2P downloads.
• ISP internal data delivery (hop count) feel from and average of 5.5 hops to 0.89 hops.
• Traffic localization within metro locations increased from 6.27% for P2P to 57.98% for P4P enhanced delivery.
• Some FTTH users saw as much as 665% the download speed of unmanaged P2P.

Peer-to-Peer can be done legally, securely and for the mutual benefit of all parties. Thanks to the DCIA and a whole lot of smart people, we are headed toward more intelligent networks that will provide faster performance and a better experience to all users.

It was only a matter of time. As more users access bandwidth heavy applications Time Warner is looking into changing its pricing structure to adapt. According to Time Warner: “around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity,” a figure that should come as no surprise.

While metered bandwidth is potentially a good thing, it opens the door for ISPs to up costs for heavy users while keeping rates unnaturally high for users with comparatively low levels of use. On the one hand, when faced with throttling p2p and other high bandwidth applications, metered use seems very reasonable.

The problem is that it’s not about improving network efficiency, it’s about money. The Time Warner’s of the world will inevitably turn this into another method of increasing their bottom line. Billing based on usage will wind up costing all users more money.

The high-def and DVD-quality p2p video distribution platform Vuze has landed $20 million in funding, according to an article in MultiChannel News.

For those who are unfamiliar with Vuze, it is built on top of the Azureus bittorrent client, one of the most popular, and open-source, file-sharing utilities. Just like Napster and BitTorrent.com, Vuze is a legal re-incarnation of what was formerly a platform for piracy. Some of their 100+ content partners include Showtime, Starz, A&E, BBC, PBS, and The History Channel.

According to an article in today’s Times Union, two former top execs of Wurld Media have been indicted on a number of charges ranging from misdemeanor failure to pay benefits to felony grand larceny and money laundering.

Gregory Kerber, former Chief Executive and Richard Saxton, former financial officer were each arraigned on nine charges.

Assets of Wurld Media, an online music and video file-sharing company, were sold to ROO Media for $4.3 million in in July, however most of the alleged charges took place before that deal was signed.

According to Mediapost, Roo bought “strategic P2P assets of Wurld Media,” for $4.3 million, consisting of $3.2 million in cash and the issuance of approximately 655,000 shares of ROO common stock.

While it doesn’t appear (at this point) that there’s anything for Roo to be concerned with here, they certainly don’t need any negative publicity or associations while they struggle to turn things around. Last month they reported net operating loss of approximately $8.5 million in the third quarter of 2007.

Popular Piracy Players Go Primetime

Anyone who has dabbled in downloading music, movies and software has undoubtedly heard of BitTorrent. The technology, originally developed by Bram Cohen, caught fire within the pirate community as the most popular way for sharing large files over the internet.

But BT isn’t just technology used to rip of “the man” anymore. In Februrary of this year, BitTorrent went legit (at least as a company), and opened its doors with content partnerships from leading studios such as 20th Century Fox, Comedy Central, Lions Gate, Paramount and Warner Brothers.

Today, BitTorrent announced that it is extending its content distribution technology - dubbed BitTorrent DNA - to other publishing platforms as well. Their first partnership is with the popular web publishing technology provider, Brightcove.

P2P technology enables publishers to reduce their streaming costs and increase efficiency by delivering streams from multiple content hosts, also known as seeds, rather than delivering from the one original source.

BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin explains the benefit of using torrent technology this way: “Companies spend more than 20 cents an hour to stream video over the Internet, which means they lose money because they cannot pull in more than 20 cents an hour in advertising revenue.”

Other pirate faves are also going legit. Azereus, formerly just the most popular bittorrent client, has also begun signing deals and distributing long-form, high def and DVD quality videos, as well as niche content from leading media companies. They recently announced content deals with Showtime Networks, BBC Worldwide, A&E, History Channel, National Geographic, and Starz Media. Content is distributed using the Azereus Vuze platform.

Ben Adds: Bittorrent’s accelerator follows on the heels of similar products such as Swarmcast’s Autobahn and Speedbit’s Video Accelerator. These products can improve user experience by providing a smoother, often higher quality stream while lowering the cost of delivery for distributors but network providers appear to be the losers and have so far been hostile to them.

Increased P2P traffic as a result of these kinds of applications will increase the load placed on networks by end-users on flat-rate data plans and ISPs will react. Network capacity is a zero-sum game. If P2P lowers costs for distributors like Brightcove while increasing traffic and network congestion for providers, ISPs will be forced to raise rates in new places.

If you enjoy watching online video and expect to use a lot of upstream bandwidth, be prepared to pay more for that privilege in the future.

Gavin O’Malley at Mediapost is reporting that WebTV company Joost has bought OnTheToob.com, a digital programming guide provider.

OnTheToob’s technology enables users to create their own customized channels and RSS feeds based on the programming they watch.

Both companies are still in beta, but there has been increasing concern about Joost’s chances for success given its current business and operational models. Most vocally, Henry Blodget at the Silicon Alley Insider has repeatedly - and quite strenuously - questioned some core components to Joost’s plans for WebTV dominance.

Internet calling company Skype has announced new partnerships with Dailymotion and Metacafe as part of the introduction of the latest version of the platform, Skype 3.5.

The newest feature enables users to include videos from Dailymotion and Metacafe as part of their Skype “Mood,” providing a new outlet for sharing your favorite videos. According to the press release, users can also share videos during their conversations. “Video content is a great conversation starter because people love talking about video clips and especially the ones that are personal to them.” said Carter Adamson, general manager, desktop products for Skype.

A new level of convergence? Maybe. Why you wouldn’t just share the link is beyond me, but I’m not one for mixing my media. “Check out this video ,” has always worked just fine for me.