Much hyped, much maligned video portal Joost is set to relaunch tomorrow, this time, sans download. Oddly, the logins from my previous accounts don’t seem to work, so I’m guessing there will be plenty of signing up again. Unfortunately, in my attempts to sign back up, I keep getting a “Something went wrong, please try again later” message.

Keep your fingers crossed for these guys. They can’t afford to botch another launch.

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.