Joost Says They Have 1 million Beta Users; Launch By Year End

1 million is a lot of beta users. But that’s the number of users that IPTV startup Joost co-founder Niklas Zennström said are using the service at a press event in Estonia yesterday (get your invitation to Joost here). And he also said the service would launch publicly by year end.

The company, which raised $45 million in venture capital in May, is one of the trendy startups right now. And they’ve benefited from some of YouTube’s legal woes by becoming the partner of choice for the anti-Google crowd.

Some complain that online TV should come through the browser, not a new application like Joost (which, however, is built partially on the Mozilla application framework). But Joost is a solid application that is attracting some well known content owners. Having the Skype founders behind it certainly hasn’t hurt, of course. This could be the web application launch of the year.