What Happened to Joost?

Not that long ago, Joost was the flavour of the month: everyone wanted a beta invite, everyone was talking about how it could revolutionize video, and of course everyone wanted to talk about how Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom were going to completely disrupt the TV industry after disrupting both the online music business (with Kazaa) and the phone industry (with Skype).

And then what happened? A bunch of things. But mostly, at least as far as I’m concerned, the network failed to come up with enough compelling reasons to download and install the software, as I wrote here. There was some interesting programming, but not a huge amount. The app was cool enough to use and there were some interesting features — such as the ability to chat about a show while watching it — but nothing that was a must-have. Many of the users I spoke to said they eventually stopped using it and went back to watching TV on the web.

So what is really going on at Joost? I have no way of knowing, but when you have to fire your CTO, that doesn’t send a great message. Maybe it’s because of how Dirk-Willem van Gulik left, and how quickly he wound up going to work at BBC, I don’t know. But this commenter on the NewTeeVee post — who claims to be an insider at Joost — says that things are not going well: “The mood is very bad inside the company, money is running out fast, the cash burn is of course way way too high, and so there is a lot of nervousness. Honestly, I think they are dead.”

The writing is on the wall for Joost: The company just fired its CTO under what can only be described as puzzling circumstances. Then there are all those rumors about disappointing user numbers, funding issues and staffers looking for new jobs. It’s hard to tell whether these are true, but it’s clear that Joost is getting beat left and right by its competitors. Just take a look at Hulu, and you know that the Joost team has good reason to be worried.