Joost is an innovative Web TV application – i.e. TV over Web not Web via your TV such as Microsoft’s Web TV aka msntv.

Joost is the product of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom of Skype fame. After selling Skype for $2.6 billion to eBay they started developing their Next Big Thing. The service is currently in Beta – as any self-respecting Web 2.0 service should be – and I got an invitation from a Rails colleague to try it out.

I first read about Joost in Time magazine (March 12th 2007) and the article had big slogans as “50,000 TV CHANNELS!” etc. which really caught my eye. That 50k is the goal for Joost in 10 years’ time as it currently offers less than 50 channels. The catch of free to consumer quality TV over the web is simple: targeted marketing. It is the same thing that Google does quite well.

Targeted marketing

If you search for “CPU comparison” on Google, it is quite likely that an ad for Intel or AMD processors would be spot on. This is all nice and dandy, but those are quite broad strokes to be painting with.

Joost on the other hand can profile the user much more accurately. For example if I watch Top Gear for 30 minutes drooling at incredibly fast cars and then watch a 20 minute ultimate fight on the fight channel it is quite easy to profile me as a so and so old male and thus target me with, say, beverage commercials instead of nail polish. And that is what Joost will be making their money on, because they can quite confidently offer companies less wasted ad money since commercials are being shown only to their target audience!

Still Beta!

Although as I said, the service is in Beta still (version 0.9.1 at the time of the writing.) and so are its commercials – yesterday I watched super cars for 30 minutes and during them I saw approximately four 15 second ads for a women’s hair product.

Not quite there yet, but looks promising!

When Joost hits 1.0 and steps out of Beta, I’ll write another, fuller, review of it and its then current content.