Joost Kills P2P; Gets Focused on Getting Bought

After much speculation Joost has announced the shutdown of their downloaded player app and P2P video service as of tomorrow. If content is king then Joost is dead. But if user experience is king they may still have a shot, at least in the form of acquisition by a mainstream media company seeking to increase online engagement.

Joost.com gets excellent traffic, they have major content partners (if weak content) and a development team which took a while to fail, but learned from their mistakes to create a pretty solid video site from a user standpoint.

Unlike Hulu’s oft-quoted desire to “fail fast” Joost has taken forever and spent a boatload of money on projects they wound up shutting down. Finally, they have come to the conclusion many including us reached long ago:

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.

Now we have another competitor to Hulu, the new Sling.com and the upcoming CBS site TV.com. Joost’s best hope at this point is that CBS, years behind other major media companies in their digital efforts buys them for their technology and empowers their engineers to disengage CBS from its historic blind reliance on third parties to make Joost technology for video and social engagement the core of the CBS interactive unit.