Joost: It coulda been a contender, or not

by admin November 25, 2009 at 2:34 pm

If you stepped in late, it sounds awfully dull.

An announcement Tuesday tells us all that “certain assets” of a “white-label” online video service called Joost have been acquired by Adconion Media, which calls itself “the largest independent global audience and content network.” The acquisition “will be able to provide advertisers, content owners, and Web site publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution,” according to a statement from Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius. Financial terms were not disclosed. Yawn.

But really, it’s an exceptionally anticlimactic ending for Joost, a company so secretive and hyped that it was once known, James Bond-like, as “The Venice Project,” and which was supposed to kill YouTube and that dastardly Cold War villain known as your cable company. It was a scrappy start-up with roots in lawlessness–founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom had built onetime file-sharing hub Kazaa–but major street cred, too, as they’d also founded Skype and sold it to eBay. There were impressive backers, too, including CBS (which owns CNET).

What went wrong?

Read more: news.cnet.com