Joost Dumps P2P Service

Yesterday Joost announced they abandon their p2p service without detailing about what caused this decision. It seems that the company has been working on ways to become an actual competitor of other much more successful services like Hulu. Whether they will be able to do that remains uncertain.

Joost proved to be ingenious with its online video service when it first launched it two years ago. It wasn’t based on streaming video but on a Mozilla-based client available for download. The real strong point of the service was the fact that Joost client had integrated person-to-person file sharing which also equale to reduced bandwidth bills. Moreover, this eliminated the problem of overloading servers while showing live shows since automatically users would just grab the stream from others.

Still, YouTube followed by Hulu took things in another direction using Flash to deliver videos and enabling users to create link to specific videos, and also embed videos they liked on their own sites.
Joost came in September with an update offering users the possibility to opt for an all-Flash site in September. The company raised a nice amount of $45 million round of funding in 2006 but they may have to come up with some ideas quickly if they want their business to thrive again.