“The biggest lesson - people want to watch great content,” former Joost CEO Mike Volpi.

“The challenge with the online video business is pretty straightforward - most of the economics accrue at this point to the companies that own the content itself and, for the intermediaries, there aren’t any, that I can think of, profitable business models out there. The challenge is that media companies have approached the sector with more of a self-publishing model, meaning the content comes from their websites, as opposed to through aggregators.

“The challenge that Joost had throughout it’s life was that it had virtually no access to exclusive content. Many people will make issue of the choice to go with peer-to-peer or not, to go with a client or not; fundamentally, the issue is the content wasn’t what we needed it to be. That’s probably the biggest lesson - people want to watch great content.”

—Who’s to blame for not having great content?: “You can’t really say that you’d blame anybody for it. Content companies have decided that it’s in their best interests to publish from their own websites. I still believe that consumers generally would like to have that type of content on a good aggregation site, they would still love to have it on Joost, or YouTube or whomever - but, broadly speaking, the media companies have decided that’s not the strategy they’re going to pursue. Everybody acts in their own self-interest.”

Nice to see content is starting to get its due.  Read more.

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