Joost was squeezed out of the market by broadcasters setting up their own VOD channel admits Mike Volpi, who resigned as CEO. He said that in April, when Disney joined the Hulu joint venture, it became pretty clear Joost had to do something else — it is becoming a white label video provider.

Explaining how the scene had panned out fundamentally different to how Joost had forecast, he said the challenge with the online video business is the economics accrue to the companies that own the content and, for the intermediaries, there aren’t any profitable business models out there. The challenge is that media companies have approached the sector with more of a self-publishing model, meaning the content comes from their websites, as opposed to through aggregators.

"I still believe that consumers generally would like to have that type of content on a good aggregation site, they would still love to have it on Joost, or YouTube or whomever - but, broadly speaking, the media companies have decided that’s not the strategy they’re going to pursue. Everybody acts in their own self-interest," Volpi told paid content.

"The strategy of media companies really began to shift with the advent of Hulu in US and the iPlayer in the UK. From that point on, we did our best to collect the best content that we could. Frankly, Joost got to 3.5 million worldwide uniques, which puts it in the upper echelon of people outside the iPlayer/Hulu world. So we did as well as we could with premium content but it certainly wasn’t of the scale of the other guys." (Source: advanced-television.com)

Story filed 14.07.09