venice project Archive

Jeremy Peters at the NY Times has a good writeup today about Joost (formerly The Venice Project). I have believed for a while now that YouTube won't be the answer for television online. YouTube should remain as a user-generated media site. That's where the $1.5B value comes from.

The creators of Joost come from a pretty strong background. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis initally started Kazaa, then moved into leadership roles with Skype (where they remain today).

From the Times article:

Joost (pronounced “juiced”) (allen note: I thought it was pronounced yooste) said last week it had reached what amounts to the mother lode of television programming: agreements to broadcast programs from Viacom networks like MTV, Comedy Central and VH1. While the deal’s terms were not disclosed, Viacom and Joost will share advertising revenue.

"We are very happy with the Viacom deal because it spans all their big properties," Mr. Friis said. “It has content from their biggest properties — MTV, Comedy Central — that are very good for our demographic." (Mr. Zennstrom was on vacation and unavailable to comment, a Joost spokeswoman said.)

While I am not sure if Joost will be the winner in this market, their application (which I check out daily) is pretty strong and the video quality is decent too. I look forward to checking out the Viacom clips once they are integrated.

joost (formerly The Venice Project) has updated their beta test. Here is the information about the update:

Today we have good news, and we have great news. In addition to the 0.8 release which includes new CoreAVC Video decoder, which significantly improves the quality of the video, we also have an Intel Mac beta version.

In checking out the improved video quality, we also hope you'll notice that we've added quite a lot of content and quite a few channels. These include:

* Documentaries from National Geographic;
* Loud noise and fast cars from the Indy Racing League;
* Healthy living programming from Lime;
* A variety of reality series in the Lazy TV channel from Endemol;
* Cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle in Saturday Morning TV (Classic Media);
* A lineup of independent film makers from IndieFlix;
* More reality TV with the Bridezillas series from September Films;
* Video gaming tricks and reviews form Gamestar;
* Comical, irreverent and edgy programming from Bite TV
* And cool new Bollywood music videos from Savvn.

I really like the quality of the video in joost. I have enjoyed watching the World's Strongest Man competitions. Who knew you could carry a fridge 2 miles on your back!?!

Sure seems like we have the tokens that people want! 

I have 2 more Venice Project tokens (beta accounts) to give away. It's simple, post a meaningful message on the new CN Forums, and you get one. Simple. Better be quick!

Check out our previous coverage of Venice Project. Big Thanks to shaxs for the tokens!

BOTH CURRENTLY AVAILABLE – grab the RSS FEED to know when we get more!