Viacom to put clips on Joost, rebuffs YouTube
Poor YouTube. You know you're having a bad day when a video-sharing app built by the creators of Kazaa is considered more secure than your Web site.
Just three weeks after pulling their content from YouTube, Viacom is expected to announce today a broad licensing agreement with Joost, a P2P video platform which was only recently released into beta. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman says the decision was made because Joost promised to protect Viacom's copyrights.
Viacom's decision to go with Joost is a very public rebuff to YouTube's irksome decision to only deploy filtering technology after a company signs a distribution agreement.
Of course, Joost and YouTube aren't head-to-head rivals. YouTube offers low-res clips through a single site, while Joost aims to provide full-length, high-quality vids via P2P technology.
But Joost is also free, and it scales: "You can try to cut costs by allowing only crappy little images. You can limit the run times or make money selling hardware," said Dirk-Willem van Gulik, Joost's chief technical architect in an interview with Wired. "But eventually the bandwidth bills will eat you alive. YouTube, iTunes, and the rest of them haven't got a chance. We just hope they take their time realizing it."
