Viacom Turns to Joost, Spurns YouTube

Vincenzo writes "Viacom has signed a deal with Joost that will see content from MTVI, Comedy Central, and CBS distributed on the new P2P distribution service. The move comes just two weeks after demanding YouTube pull over 100,000 videos offline. 'Joost's promise to protect their copyrights was a major factor in Viacom's decision, and also a stumbling block in their discussions with YouTube/Google. At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.' It's also a 'secure' distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry, since users can't upload content themselves.'"

Great thinking guys

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.

The lack of executive foresight never ceases to amaze me. Did they ever consider that no exploits exist for Joost because:

1. Joost isn't yet available to the public at large. (You need to sign up for a beta.)

2. No one cares about Joost?

If Viacom signs a contract with Joost, the "security" of their distribution method will change in a hurry.

The amazing part is that a simple trip down the hall to the IT department would have told these executives this. It's just too bad that execs never trust their own technology staff. As far as they're concerned, we're just a bunch of whiners and worry-warts. :-/

Besides, someone might save that 2 minute Craig Ferguson clip to their hard drive. OMG, OMG, OMG! The world will end! What will they do?!? (Shh! No one tell them about VCRs!)

That being said, I'm sure this move is actually more political than technical. Which only makes Viacoms position that much worse. Do they really want to cover over their political maneuvering by making themselves look uneducated?

From the Joost website:

Yesterday, we were The Venice Project(TM). Today, we're Joost(TM). Tomorrow, we're yours!

And that would make us, YourJoost(TM)! Which you can watch on a tube. Sort of like a... YourTube(TM). Or something.

Who writes this stuff?

Re:Great thinking guys

One of the nice things we see in music these days is the little guy creating and distributing high-quality audio. I'd like to see the same for video. The problem so far is that only these behemoth companies own the current content and can afford large production and distribution. If finally we'd see some significant competition from startups then Viacom and others might be forced to let go a little. If some hot new show distributed freely over the internet took eyeballs away from Viacom content maybe they'd be forced to come to their senses. Maybe.

Re:sure, but where do I see money?

Commercials and/or product placement. I can imagine some "internet shows" having commercials, but we know someone will cut them out and re-upload them. So I image they'll go the other route that currently pays: product placement within the show. If Coke will pay one of your actors to sip a soda during a show you get money and no one will cut it and redistribute. If the show needs a car, and Toyota is willing to pay to have it be one of their cars, then that's great. As long as it doesn't obstruct the actual presentation I believe product placements are the way to go for online content.

Re:Great thinking guys

The idea here, is to block Google as the emerging media powerhouse.

I know it is probably ill-conceived, and the touted 'intellectual property' reasons are more secondary cover - than they are prime motivator.

Everyone is afraid of GOOG - telcos, TV and Cable channels, Hollywood and Microsoft. Watch them position and align to marginalize and even criminalize them. It is pretty pathetic. The 'content providers' especially. They want a 'pay at the gate' scenario, and will compromise/misunderstand every technology to get there.

Re:Great thinking guys

Many video cards include an S-Video output. Coupled with an available audio output, it is a simple matter to run the pair through an external digital video encoder to get it into DV, then crop it to get an unencumbered copy. I've done it for my employer (I was assured we had permission for the purpose for which it was used).

The video was below SD quality, but if it was greater I could have done multiple captures and stitched the frames together given enough overlap. You don't even need timecodes when you have jump cuts.

Re:Great thinking guys

(Shh! No one tell them about VCRs!)

You're forgetting that their response was almost identical when VCRs first came out.

Re:Great thinking guys

As you know, it's not about copyrights or money. It's about control. The media industry doesn't want to lose control of content. If anyone can upload, then anyone can upload content -- it doesn't even matter who's it is. They've been calling the shots, deciding what people should see and how the pairs of eyeballs should be divided up amongst them. Google/YouTube creates anarchy and chaos where they no longer have control over what people see and what people do with what they see.

Mass media isn't so profitable if everyone can participate. That's what it's all about and that's what it's always been all about. Everything else is misdirection.

Re:Great thinking guys

2. No one cares about Joost?

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. See, they know it will be secure because no one cares about Joost. What better way to keep people from "stealing" your IP than to create a new service that is a clone of already popular and well-established services so that no one cares to use it? Genius, I tell ya.

There's no known exploit 'cause nobody's cared

Enough to make one. If there's content people want, they'll break joost too.

It's as if they never learn...

the point?

Of grainy videos and horrible low bitrate audio? I just don't get the point of watching music videos over the net. For me, audio quality is paramount, and 32kbps WMA doesn't cut it.

That and most music videos are shite anyways. Just some half-naked plastic whore dancing around to music that other people wrote. The actual quality song and accompanying video are fairly rare nowadays...

If I wanted to look at naked women via the web, I wouldn't turn to shitty music videos.

Tom

1.65bn in stock later

What does Google have in its YouTube acquisition?

Probably a lot of angry stock holders is my future bet.

I hope they have something big in the works because its sure a lot to pay for a site that is suddenly looking mighty bare.

Re:1.65bn in stock later

Um.... A little publicity, a little goodwill, ads next to the YouTube content, good programmers, and a method of distribution they consider the future. Not so good on a cash-on-a-barrel level, but quite good for a company with some vision....

Is the smaller audience more beneficial?

You have to wonder what Viacom is thinking here. Joost's market share is much smaller than the other video services (Google, YouTube, Yahoo, etc). Is copyright protection such an issue that they would shun the market leaders?

I'm still not sure why there is such a big deal about copyrighted video on YouTube. The advertising you get for your show being uploaded to the site is probably worth much more than the marginal lost you may have incurred from it being uploaded. I don't anyone is interested in archiving the lower quality flash video files from their site. Pirates will always get the shows from bittorent or other P2P services. The only thing I can think of is they are worried about loosing web traffic from each shows website. Why not cross link to the videos on YouTube from their websites?

The entertainment industry really needs to start getting creative. They need to learn to work with these new technologies and trends, rather than against them.

Re:Is the smaller audience more beneficial?

You have to wonder what Viacom is thinking here. Is copyright protection such an issue that they would shun the market leaders?

Realisticly, it's an attempt by Viacom to place pressure on GooTube to do what they want. What they want is for Google to offer ultra-restrictive access to their... [my] precious... video content. Furthermore, they want Google to invent a foolproof copyright checker (as if such a thing is possible) to prevent average users from uploading Daily Show and Stephen Colbert clips. They're using the Joost deal as a bargaining chip to make Google do what they want.

In reality, this will end one of two ways:

1. Google will reply with a big, "So what?" and Viacom will only pay lip service to their Joost contract. A year down the road, Viacom will come back to YouTube with a cry of "me too!" when they notice how well the advertising is working for their competitors.

2. Google will appease Viacom with special features like: Prominent display of their content on the YouTube front page. Viacom will gruffly agree (when that's really one of the outcomes they were hoping for), but "only if you guys crack down harder on copyright violations!" Joost will get dropped like a rock.

Now if this was the Google of old, I'd say they will go with the first option. But given the slow progress of Google toward becoming Just Another Big Business(TM), I'd say it's just as likely that they'll take door #2.

Color Me Stupid but:

If users can't upload, how then is it a p2p (as opposed to just having a metric ton of servers out there?) I couldn't find anything that said it was a p2p (or that users couldn't upload) on their website. www.joost.com

another one sided distribution system

although the summary focused on the "guarantee" of security joost represented for viacom, i think the one-sided distribution model is the big difference. i think, fundamentally, google's business plan revolves around letting end users become the content providers, and google just indexes all of the content -- they make it possible to navigate. this is a view orthogonal to what we're seeing with the media companies, of course. they want to create the content, own it, and control it. they don't want to sell it, but to license it.

the problem, of course, is a matter of generating quality content from the user side.

1/3 of the content i "consume" is probably user-generated. if it weren't for movies/netflix, and television bits on youtube, it would be much closer to 100%. i can certainly envision a future where it becomes more and more fragmented as the tools to generate content become cheaper and cheaper.

mr c

Ladies and Gentlemen!!!!

....start your Torrent Clients!! Did the xxIA not get the memo that Pandora's box was opened and the key flushed down the internet tubes?

Correction

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such feature for Joost is known to exist

Fixed that there for ya.

Something Lost

TA:

Truth be told, Joost is nothing like YouTube. Joost is all about TV-length programming, although it can show shorter clips and even feature-length films. Most importantly, Joost is focused on commercial video content, not the user creations that have made YouTube so popular. To wit, you cannot upload content to Joost, making it a "secure" distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry.

The ability for users to upload their own videos onto YouTube is a large part of it's appeal. The article admits that user creations have made YouTube popular, why would you want to get away from that? I guess to appease the big shot content owners. Additionally, I bet joe-end-user hasn't heard of Joost, whereas YouTube is mainstream.

The real story here

It's also a 'secure' distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry, since users can't upload content themselves

Regardless of your position on the fair-use/control of content (by fair-use I mean being able to play content you legally on whatever device, etc. you wish), this statement smells of "monopolistic" activity. Unlawful activities do not start at users uploading content. They start with users uploading content they don't own (or even before that). The idea that an organization would believe it is appropriate to say a service is only 'secure' because we're the only ones who can submit content to it goes against everything that a free-market society believes. That one single quote does not say that users can't pirate content; rather, it says that we're the only organization with the rights to create and distribute our content.

In my opinion, that is the big story here. Not the decision to choose one delivery method over another.

Wow, this says it all, if anything does

...since users can't upload content themselves.

Of course. Only big content providers should be allowed to upload anything at all. Don't give these people a dime, please. "Don't feed the bears".

What exactly is Joost's interest?

For the end user, Joost offers nothing he/she couldn't get otherwise. It even offers significantly LESS, since you can't upload and share your own videos. It will NEVER get even HALF the userbase of YouTube, which dooms it to failure as a "p2p" (more like b2pvr (business to peer via mafiAA, and god knows THAT's the wave of the future *rolls eyes*) network. So why exactly would anyone who currently "pirates" be interested in such a crummy service?

Re:What exactly is Joost's interest?

Comparing joost and youtube is a bit of a apples and oranges scenario.

IIRC, Joost is the diametric opposite of YouTube. The user experience in YouTube is P2P, but the technology is B2C. For Joost, the user experience is (I am guessing) B2C, but the technology is P2P.

Again , I don't know a lot about Joost (I'm not a TV watcher), but it sounds to me like something that would be attractive to content providers because it offers a familiar business model. It's like Joost is a cable network that delivers over the Internet.

Viacom != CBS

Viacom and CBS split up about a year ago. I believe CBS has a pretty tight deal [youtube.com] going on with YouTube, actually.

None of this is tangible in any way--all for PR

Consider: Viacom and others have little bargaining power against the huge number of ways that users can seed content so that it's difficult for engines to find. People would have to actually look at videos to find a 24hrs episode-- it's easy to mask content so that a trawler wouldn't find it. So each and every content owner, lacking a decent solution of their own, will try and position themselves against GooTube in anyway they can, including the Joost Ruse just announnced. It's incumbent on content providers to at least appear that they're trying to protect their assets. Just dumping the content would rile the hell out of Wall Street-- as in 'giving away the store' sorts of criticisms. It's completely natural, even if Joost never sees the light of day, to have invented them.

Ho-hum

It's also a 'secure' distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry, since users can't upload content themselves.

...which is exactly why it won't be nowhere as popular as YouTube. Viacom should understand that there's more to YT than evil hackers trying to steal their precious copyrighted material.

it sounds like the usual crap

Let me start of by saying, I don't mind paying for watching programs. If they're reasonably short, I don't even mind the occasional ad. But I also don't have unlimited resources. Buying content from iTunes still seems too expensive to me. I'd like to get The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Battlestar Gallatica, Mythbusters, and possibly Psych. That very quickly comes close to just getting cable TV. Which I don't want for several reasons (one of them, is I'm unable to do a 1 year contract).

So I've been waiting for IPTV. Technically, I don't understand why it would be so difficult to do. I mean, Comedy Central's Motherload already does it. Only crappily. You can't actualy get the full show, and the picture is *really* *really* small. But I guess there are other reasons that I may never fully understand. Though, in my naivate, I'm going to suggest greed as being on the top of the list.

And as the article pointed out, Youtube and Joost serve two different purposes. I mean, I guess it would be nice to get anything I wanted on Youtube, but the clips I've seen are never the full show, and once again, that is what I'd like. Watching short clips of a funny show just aggrevate me.

And so I'm actually excited about Joost. I mean, I still am not exactly sure how it will work, since the details seem to be a bit skimpy, but at least it has the potential. Then I skim over some of the shows that Viacom is releasing, and it all looks like crap. Especially since I don't see the Daily Show on their list. It's a 'will include' list, but that usually means what they don't list are only crappier crap.

Perhaps it's something as simple as them testing the market, and not wanting to release their 'prized possessions', but that seems stupid to me. The shows they have listed, I, nor do I suspect most people, care to see. So they'll run it for a while, claim low viewership, and end the program. And then they'll cite the stats as to why they'll never do anything with the interweb again. Assholes.

It's not that I think all their claims are invalid .. their sales model is based on the fact that with old-style TV, you have to watch the crap they want you to watch. You have to watch the ads, you have to watch a specific time, and if it's crap, you'll watch anyways.

It's not that it's impossible to come up with a new sales-model. They just have no interest in doing so.

Download and store video?

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.

Sure there is. Its just not as direct as they are thinking. Since its digital media being displayed on screen, all ya gotta do is dump the video memory of the screen area where its displayed to disk. Instant saved video. There are numerous software packages out there to do this, some free, some not, but all designed specifically for this. Similar to using a tape recorder to record the music from the radio, or a camcorder to record a TV show, but in pure digital fashion, since its pulling the direct digital image from ram. Just another tech developed to fuel the pr0n industry, mostly used for people to record webcams ;)

Tm

"no such exploit is known to exist"

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.

3... 2... 1...

(Also: "exploit", huh?)

It's amazing how none of you get it

So many people here are comparing Joost to YouTube. They're not the same. They're not *meant* to be the same. Joost is about high-quality (video and audio) content. Stuff that I can watch on my 70" HDTV with Bose surround sound. Not stuff to be played through my crappy laptop speakers. Do you all honestly think that the guys behind both Kazaa and Skype *don't* know what they're doing?

here we go again

"no such exploit for Joost is known to exist" ...yet.

Joost to be ignored by larger net population

... users can't upload content themselves.

Exactly why Joost is destined to become irrelevant.

It'll be more secure all right...

...because no one will use it. They'll have full control. <crickets>

zudeo is the only one that has it right: download quality clips, now that I'll do...when they get something actually interesting... streaming post stamps? I've got better things to do with my time...

no such exploit for Joost is known to exist?

I don't have the time to read the 200-odd comments posted before me on this topic, I do hope there is at least 1 in there that expresses this but, just in case no one hit this nail: A major corporation (viacom) stupidity struggles in some arcane batlle over copyrighted material? There are established venues for income, that all local yocals have invested in for decades- to the delight of compnies like Viacom (though they are few and far between). Screen capture anyone? Why is it still not widely understood that if it appears onscreen it will be recorded to other medium, or even, if it is heard it can as well be uncontrollably, albeit at reduced professional quality, recoreded? I rarley hear these sentiments! Wow. Insofar as Viacom on this topic is concerned, Isn't this (the internet) simply an important marketing/sales vessel, to be treated and utilized as such? I can almost hear them in the Monday morning meetings: "so, what do we do with this internet thing?" Unreal, in today's "Digital Age". Maybe I am the fool, and all the ruckus is just more marketing....

So this is the place we get invites? :)

If so, please help me by sending one!! I would love to test Joost!! ( matthe . smit (at) gmail (dot) com Thanks!

capturing Joost

Right - windows users never heard of Snap X. Anything sent to my screen I can convert to a quicktime MOV, of any quality. Content - you're nabbed and ready to be uploaded elsewhere. Oops - I'm sorry - did that fuck up Joost's marketing plan?

Gosh I'm sorry about that.

Bah!

This is all just totally Joostless! I am SOOOOOO pissed. Screw you Viacom. Like we care if you won't let us play in your reindeer games. There's some hot mares over here that look just fine...

Just as clueless as the music industry

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.'

All of these shows are normal TV shows that are broadcast over the air/on cable. Any show on TV can be (and most are) digitized and uploaded to P2P sites after having all the commercials stripped out. In fact, since pirates usually digitize the HD streams of TV shows, they offer much higher quality than either YouTube or the iTunes store.

It looks like the TV people are just as dumb as the music people: DRM doesn't make sense if you also give away your product in a DRM-free format!

CopyFight is Good Business

This distribution deal is a move that is good for the Internet media revolution. For one, it establishes a real competitor to YouTube with content people will actually want to watch. Without bundling that content with the network: Joost is just the distributor, owning no rights.

But more importantly, it puts copyrighted content into a YouTube competitor that can challenge YouTube if YouTube has the content. That means that YouTube's copyright enforcement doesn't happen in an vacuum of arbitrary claims and baseless decisions. When Joost complains, it will have a copy of the content and a copy of the contract with the content owner. The process to enforce copyright between the two corporations can take place in the well understood realm of corporate negotiations and lawsuits.

Of course, it would be better for everyone (including Viacom, and especially YouTube and Joost) if copyrights didn't slow down every media transaction. But until copyrights actually are peeled back to a legitimate scope, duration and enforcement regime, getting competitors with paper trails to manage it is the best we can do, and better than nothing.

Let me get this straight...

It's secure because people can't upload???? An earlier sentiment expresses my doubts on that matter --It's doubtful it'll go too far.

Even worse, to me this is a giant "fuck you" to the home creators who utilize Youtube for their own fun. I, for one, like some of the user stuff I've seen, and even the snippets of commercial stuff has got me looking for more content.

I barely watched the Daily show until I was turned on to some great clips on youtube.

Joost sounds more like squeezing the old top-down media format (television) into the "fancy thinkin' box" to me.

3... 2... 1...

At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.

[cough] Snapz Pro X [cough]

qz

Re:Joost is nothing and stupid.

If getting $2.6 billion for Skype qualifies as nothing and stupid then I want to be a retarded nonentity