Joost backs off consumer video

Joost, once hyped as a game-changer for online video, is taking its focus off consumers, essentially ceding the market to YouTube and Hulu.

It’s not clear from Joost’s announcement whether its online video portal will go away completely. The company merely says that it will now focus on "white label online video platforms," meaning that Joost will build video portals for other companies, such as cable providers and broadcasters.

Several sites including CNet and Multichannel News say that the move is an all-out retreat from consumer video. However, Mike Volpi, Joost’s CEO, was quoted in MediaPost as saying that Joost.com and its associated video operations will continue to run.
Either way, the refocus is a major turning point for Joost, which was hyped to no end when it launched as a desktop application in 2007. A year later, the company stopped supporting the desktop program and switched to an online-only portal. By then, YouTube was a dominant force and Hulu was picking up steam. Joost’s content offerings, which focused heavily on anime and music videos, filled a niche but never took off in the mainstream.

Interestingly, Joost showed signs of life recently with a viewing window optimized for the Playstation 3, and before that, an iPhone application. Whether the company continues to support these uses remains to be seen.