Even though Joost does not rely on its P2P architecture anymore, the video quality is still high, especially in full-screen mode, but it does not rival that of the 'HD' offering of ABC or Vimeo.

More Social

Joost has also added a wealth of social features to its site. You can now easily share videos with your friends on Joost and join one of the newly established Joost groups. Also, everything you watch is stored in your 'JoostFeed,' which you can choose to make public. If you really do not want your friends to know that you have been watching Brittany Spears videos all night again, you can also turn on a 'Stealth Mode.'

Because of its reliance on a plugin, however, Joost does not offer the ability to embed videos yet. We assume that this feature will be available once Joost has moved over to using Flash.

Too Little, Too Late?

Overall, we think it was about time for Joost to move to the browser. However, a lot of what Joost set out to do in 2006 has already been done on the web. Its biggest competitor is probably Hulu, which has content deals with almost every large TV network and is slowly adding more HD content. Joost will have a hard time competing, unless it can sign up a similarly large number of quality content producers.

Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.

As Mike Volpi points out on the Joost blog, the company will also downsize its staff in New York and London, and shut down its development center in the Netherlands. Joost will continue to host content on Joost.com, however, and keep the portal running for the time being. The focus of Joost, however, will be on the white label platform, which the company describes as a "cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands."

Volpi also announced that he is stepping down as Joost's CEO. Matt Zelesko, Joost's current SVP of engineering, will replace Volpi as CEO.

Lots of Competition

Joost is entering a pretty crowded market, with Brightcove, Viddler, EdgeCast and many others vying for customers. There can be no doubt that Joost will be able to deliver the technology, but we will have to wait and see if Joost can make this transition and attract enough customers for its white label solution.

last100 has covered both Joost and BabelGum recently. The last100 review of Babelgum explained that it is a new peer-to-peer online video service founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia. Like Joost, it aims to combine the "lean-back experience" of television with the interactivity of the web. Check it out and let us know what you think.

If you haven't checked out Joost lately, I can tell you that I looked at it for the first time in months tonight: it looks nicer, has far more content (and ads) than before and appears more stable on a Mac. It's free for anyone to download. The meebo integration was supposed to have gone live minutes ago, I'm not seeing it yet but I'm sure it will arrive soon.

A web-based cross-platform chat client, meebo says more than 1 million people spend over two and a half hours each, daily, on its site. Joost, which has started by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström amongst others, has raised almost $50 million in venture funding and says it has had more than 1 million beta testers. It's a good distribution deal for meebo, but some cross promotion to meebo users wouldn't hurt Joost either. That will likely happen, at the very least, every time a meebo user chatting with their IM friends on MSN or Yahoo messenger through Joost is asked "what are you doing?"

Meebo is a VC darling as well - this is the kind of deal that high-powered investors can help make happen, a great example of why people say it's as much about the connections as it is about the cash.

Joost launched a developer platform for widgets at the end of this summer, though there's little evidence of widespread adoption of that platform yet. Meebo launched a platform of its own last week with selected partners offering everything from integrated audio to live streaming video. Complex features are all well and good, but tonight's announcement is likely to be one of the most significant features either of these companies can offer.

This week Hulu - the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others (our previous coverage) - launched to the general public in the United States. It's been in private beta nearly five months, wrote Dan Langendorf at last100.

Joost makes live-streaming video available, starting with March Madness

Joost, the Internet TV service, is making live-streaming video available through an update to its desktop client. Joost has landed a deal with one of its investors, CBS, to stream live and relatively ad-free NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship games. The new Joost client — for the PC and Intel Macs only — was made available for download this week and is needed to access live streaming. Joost began looking into adding “live television” back in October.

TiVo continues expansion, adds YouTube to “television services” lineup

It seems a bit late, but the important thing is that TiVo keeps improving its “television services” offering. This time, TiVo is adding YouTube to its ever-expanding lineup.

TiVo’s partnership with YouTube will deliver Web video directly to user’s televisions. The catch is to get YouTube content you must own the latest TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 models.

Check out more Internet TV news from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

Here is what last100 had to say about this future for Internet TV:

"Two seemingly unrelated announcements last week have got me thinking about whether the future of “full screen” Internet TV applications, such as Joost or Babelgum, reside on a PC or, instead, some sort of set-top-box which connects to a TV.

Microsoft launched a Beta version of its new MSN Video-based “Internet TV” service, compatible with “Extenders for Media Center” devices from Cisco, D-Link, and HP; and Jaman published a software hack — albeit, unsupported — to enable content from its movie download store to work with the AppleTV.

Other online video services to have already aligned with hardware manufacturers include BitTorrent, which released an SDK for set-top boxes, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, and media extenders; Google-owned YouTube with their strong partnership with Apple; and DivX who are busy shopping around their “Connected” media extender hardware reference design to Asian consumer electronics companies.

What all of the above companies are betting, to varying degrees, is that for all the social and interactive advantages of online video, certain kinds of content, particularly long form programing, still wants to be viewed from the couch on a large widescreen TV."

See also Steve's follow-up post: Joost on a set-top-box within 18 months, based on a quote from Joost CEO Mike Volpi in a recent interview. Volpi went on to say that Joost isn't yet ready for the mainstream: "I wouldn’t expect the mainstream to go with Joost [yet]. I would expect the mainstream would probably get to Joost when they see the platform on television."

Also check out last100's posts on the SlingBox and thoughts on a possible Wii Media Center. last100 also covered the iPhone release date and the start of its advertising campaign.

AltSearchEngines

Read/WriteWeb's other network blog AltSearchEngines (newly launched this week) has been stirring things up with a "Great Debate". This is another excellent blog innovation from AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight. The topic of the Great Debate was Continuous Search Engines and Personalization, and the debaters were Mark Zeman of Searchbots, Morgan Snyder of Allth.at, and Kalem Fletcher of Swamii. You can see the entire debate in the comments section of the post. Who won? I'm not brave enough to call it!

Also featuring on ASE this week is an overview of the Health Search Engines vertical market. The conclusion was that WebMD stacks up the best, both for doctors and patients.

Finally, AltSearchEngines has a follow-up post to the June edition of the Top 100 Alt Search Engines. There were 26 new Alts, including Ms. Freckles replacing Ms. Dewey (sniff!).

Check out these and other excellent niche stories on last100 and AltSearchEngines, our two new R/WW Network blogs.

Overall, the application is smartly designed - the scrolling bar for the different channels at the top of the app is a very neat feature, for example - but the amount of content is somewhat limited. That, of course, is a problem that TV.com is quite familiar with, especially after Hulu pulled its videos from the service's web site.

The fact that you can't easily see if TV.com actually has full episodes of a particular show or only clips is especially problematic. A 30-second clip from 'Numb3rs,' for example, isn't usually going to be very interesting, while short clips are probably all you want from the 'Late Show with David Letterman.'

Will TV.com Push Others to Release Similar Apps?

It's a shame that there is currently no application that features a broader range of content from a larger number of networks. The Joost application is interesting, but its content, too, is limited, and we are still awaiting the launch of the rumored Hulu application. NBC experimented with an iPhone compatible mobile site a while back that actually featured full episodes, but that site doesn't seem to feature any full episodes anymore. At least, however, Apple isn't blocking these apps, which are, after all, competing with the downloadable shows in iTunes.

Why, then, has one of the most high profile RIA providers in recent years, Joost, moved to ditch their desktop video player?

RIAs are Good for Background Use

We like using desktop Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Twhirl or other RIAs like Fluid and Snackr. Those are all apps that work well in the background of our workflows. We spend most of our focused time in the browser. Apps that require extended focus, like video viewing, may as well go on in the browser. That way they don't require separate downloads, potentially suspect software, etc.

One advantage to an RIA is that it can sit on your computer and wait until you're in between doing other things. If your browser crashes, while you load page after page from different sources, that RIA is still there keeping up in the background - waiting until you're ready for it.

RIAs Are Best When You Need Responsiveness

Rich Internet Apps combine the responsiveness of a desktop app with the connectivity of the web. If you don't need a lot of responsiveness, though, then you may as well just stay in the browser. Despite its social features, video viewing apps like Joost are mostly consumed passively. You find something you like and then you sit there and stare at it for awhile. Responsiveness to quickly entered commands? Pretty much irrelevant.

RIAs Are Good When Storage and Offline Access Are Important

Desktop RSS readers are nice because you've got a local copy of your feeds. You can see changes to the text and you can read in a plane. It's useful to view videos when offline, but how many of them do you want to keep on your computer after you've watched them? Better to let them stream in through that part of your computer's memory and then be gone.

Amazon may have hit the sweet spot in its move yesterday to ditch Amazon Unbox and rename the service Amazon Video on Demand. Users (now including Mac owners, by the way!) can either stream video or download it locally - it's up to you.

Maybe Video Works Best in the Browser - So How About iTunes?

That's all well and good, but watching video in the browser is so convenient it's hard to beat. As Adobe's Stewart points out, even watching full screen is now trivial with the upgrades to Flash and Silverlight that weren't available when Joost first hit the scene.

Hulu is rocking out and it's no surprise. It's attractive, easy to use and has a whole lot of content. It could be better, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that a desktop client would help make it any better.

We like Rich Internet Apps sitting on our desktop, pulling and pushing data to and from the internet. We don't feel compelled to consume video that way, though. We expect to see other desktop video apps follow Joost's footsteps and move back into the browser. Might iTunes move toward an ad supported model and move to the browser some day for video? It would probably be a good idea for all the same reasons that it's smart for Joost to do so.

(original story) Our sister site last100 reports on the imminent unveiling of Microsoft’s multi-touch technology — code-named ‘PlayTable’ — which could prove to be the company’s answer to the iPhone. Also known as the Milan Project, the technology is designed to “allow users to navigate and manipulate data inside a browser or application using gestures”, says Mary Jo Foley. “Think pinches, pushes, waves, etc”. Even more intriguing is that the announcement could come as early as tomorrow, when Bill Gates is set to take the stage with his old rival, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Check out more digital lifestyle news at last100, Read/WriteWeb's first network blog.

Each of these applications, however, is really just a proof-of-concept for the "Web Media Player Framework" that Yanez is trying to create. According to Yanez, the way videos are displayed now is broken. Requiring users to navigate from page to page on multiple sites isn't as intuitive as what we're used to from television. Instead, users should be able to browse multiple videos from multiple sources from within a single player.

Writing about Hulu, Yanez says, "a video player that is capable of multi video plays is necessary for Hulu because the main complaint against embedding individual videos is that it causes the page to have endless scrolling. I believe Hulu needs to have an embeddable player unlike that of a YouTube, mainly because players like that are meant for web page viewing of short length videos and are not scalable to contain large volumes of videos."

His experimental multi video players are a solution for that problem. His goal with the media player framework is to build a single media player that is capable of sucking videos from any online source and display them in a way that is TV-like and familiar to users. Yanez also hopes to create a player that can be used on multimedia devices like the Nintendo Wii.

"My goal is to build a media player that integrates with all web video, be easy to use, have a television style feel and have capabilities to be fully integrated with multimedia devices such as the Wii and mobile phones," he writes. "The television without a doubt was one of the biggest inventions of the 20th century. I believe web video is going to be one of the biggest breakthrough's in the 21st century."

In July, when Yanez first released his Joost player, NewTeeVee suggested that Joost should hire him to create a web-based version of their player. We agree. Even better, Sling Media or Tivo should hire Yanez to create a player for the Slingbox that can suck videos off the web and put them on our TVs.

In terms of financing, Social.fm was a relatively small company. It only raised one $5 million Series A round back in 2005 and does not seem to have raised any more money since then. Chances are that the company ran out of funding and simply wasn't able to keep operating, especially in the face of declining user numbers. Social.fm's income was mainly generated through advertising in its client, though it also had a premium service available for $3.99 a month.

Doomed by the Client?

There is probably a good chance that Social.fm's client based architecture really put it at a disadvantage against its browser based competitors. Having to install yet another local client is a showstopper for a lot of users, especially if they can get the same functionality on a web site. Joost, the much hyped video service, suffers from the same problem today, while its browser based brethren like like the NBC/FOX backed Hulu continue to gain mainstream traction. Even though Joost is planning on releasing a browser plugin, this might be too little, too late by now.

There seems to be a trend among online video sites towards live streaming. Joost, which just debuted its web-based offerings, is also planning to add live streams to its service in the near future. The U.S. presidential election in particular seems to be a catalyst for live streaming. All the major U.S. networks will carry the debate live on their own web sites, and bothCurrent.tv and MySpace will provide live streams.

Hulu also announced its first premiere of a feature film, a documentary about Crawford, Texas, the site of President George W. Bush's ranch.

LiveStation’s emphasis on streaming of live rather than on-demand TV, keeps it from competing head-on with Joost and Babelgum (both of which are extremely well funded). However, as noted, others such as Zattoo are tackling the same problem as LiveStation. In the end, as ever, content will be king. And while we don’t yet know how many different Internet TV applications a user will welcome onto their desktop, it’s likely there’s room for at least one live and one on-demand offering.

Check out the full review on last100. If you haven't yet subscribed to last100, you are missing out on excellent reviews and news about digital lifestyle. We are also growing the writing team, so over the next few weeks you will see even more hands-on reviews and reporting from the last100 team.