SubscribeYouTube & Joost, One Year Later
Posted in IPTV, Television, Internet, Advertising, News on October 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
A year ago, on October 2006, Google announced that it had reached a deal to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion. That very same month Skype founders revealed “The Venice Project” or what would later be known as Joost. What has, and what hasn’t changed since then?
A little bit like Napster with the music industry, the YouTube acquisition was for many in the traditional TV industry, at least in Europe, a wake up call. Internet Television was suddenly something to take into consideration, and this was an important first change in perception.
The Venice Project meanwhile, as much as it was perfectly hyped, didn’t get as much attention with traditional media. It brought with it, however, truly evolutionary possibilities to the table, and the promise that it was built basically for copyright owners.
The second most important shift in perception was that of P2P Technology. Joost, Bittorrent and the BBC: they’ve proved that P2P wasn’t evil as the Music Industry told us, and that it could be used in ways that answer some, if not all of the needs copyright holders have regarding Internet Distribution. Internet Television Broadcasting competition flourished. A recent article (via TV Links) highlights and compares the most successful broadcasters.
Maybe those two changes in perception we mentioned would have taken years, not months, just last decade. But more, much more was expected in a year time.
Joost, for example, dropped its beta status last monday and quietly opened up to the world. Content owners and TV stations however still haven’t truly embraced it. As Janko Roettgers puts it, it’s as if they want to test the waters without getting wet. Meanwhile TV Piracy marches forward into the mainstream, as MP3 once did, up to the point of asking if we really need an Internet TV network. Not having learned their lesson from the music industry, TV executives still believe today that “one copy is one lost sale”…and that’s something that should have changed by now.
And about YouTube and their promise to come up with a business model, to monetize Internet Video: it still hasn’t happened. Their advertisement proposals have so far been poor at best. Maybe, as if to celebrate their first birthday as a Google company they announced how they are adding Adsense (basically banners) to some of their selected videos. Boring.
In a nutshell then, it wasn’t a bad year, but it definately wasn’t all that it could have been.
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