Keynote: Dreaming of Disruption

Joost is an interesting company since the guys behind it have already truly disrupted two industries: file sharing and phone, with Kazaa and Skype respectively. David Clark from Joost USA, said that they feel that the company has set very high expectations, and are feeling the pressure.

Joost fundamentally doesn’t believe that the old guys are “the bad guys.”  In the case of TV, Joost supports the TV networks and wants to work with them.

David made the point that TV today is better than in the 70/80/90’s.  Story telling and brands matter, even though some of the networks are cutting back their spend.  Joost wants to take advantage of the communities that form around TV shows - how excited people get about reality TV, as an example.  TV stations will be able to make their content much more niched, and Joost wants to manage this, providing the platform for it, along with the communities.

Joost has a lot of features not visible yet, still in development. David offered that anyone that wants to test it out can reach him via . 

They talk about that “the consumer is in control,” which has become so clichéd now that people pass over it, but in fact, it is really important. This is changing the ad industry which the consumer hasn’t previously been in control in the past. Things have been run by the ad industry and sometimes companies haven’t been aware of how their advertising has been perceived.

Joost is not convinced the 30 second spot is dead; in fact they feel it’s the right segment length. They admit they don’t know everything, and basically consider what they are doing to be a big test. If it doesn’t work, they will continue adapting until they figure it out. They are convinced this vision will happen one way or another and hope to be the ones to nail it.

They really want to engage the community, and are working with Mozilla first, enabling the mozilla community to write plugins for joost and come up with new ideas which hadn’t previously been thought of. This is a good idea.

Joost has 20 top brands getting started advertising, including Coke, Sony, HP and Kraft. It’s a good list, and given the cash resources the Joost founders have, along with top advertisers, they do have a lot of pieces in place to make it work.

Whether Joost can single handedly reform TV and control it on the net is another question - certainly the guys behind Joost have had some success, but its unclear why users will want to use their platform compared to YouTube or others.  YouTube has a tremendous amount of volume - although iTunes has managed to control most of the volume for music, so it seems conceivable that the concept behind Joost could work for television.