Video distribution and monetization platform provider Joost, owned by Adconion Media Group since its assets were acquired in November 2009, is today announcing a global sales and technology partnership with online publishing powerhouse Demand Media.

Under the terms of the exclusive agreement, Demand Media will leverage Adconion’s video ad serving platform to deliver all premium video campaigns sold by the former’s sales force.

In addition, (15 sec) pre-roll inventory on Demand Media owned and operated websites, including eHow.com, Cracked.com, Mania.com and Airlines.net, will become part of the Joost Video Network (which claims a reach of 67 million unique viewers and some 500 million total streams per month as it is).

As a result of the cross-sales deal, the Joost Video Network will be able to present Demand Media’s worldwide audience to its premium brand partners through audience and vertical channel sales packages. Adconion specially touts its targeting abilities, saying it can target pre-roll ads by demographics (age, gender, etc.), location, various ways of retargeting and behavioral data provided by third parties like BlueKai and others.

Adconion will also – exclusively – provide its video technology platform to power all of Demand Media’s in-stream video advertising needs, including trafficking, optimization, and reporting.

Demand Media claims that, collectively, its seven media brands currently attract more than 82 million unique visitors each month – 61 million people alone visit eHow.com for ‘how to’ articles and video. The company adds that it currently counts about 150,000 videos in its library.

Prior to joining Inform, Zelesko was CEO of video aggregator Joost. The failed video venture was started by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström and was eventually acquired by Adconion Media Group for an undisclosed sum. Though the video network has had a tumultuous past, the video network seems to be driving impressive amounts of traffic. Prior to joining Joost, Zelesko was VP of engineering for Comcast Interactive Media where he was responsible for the development and delivery of all CIM web properties, including the Comcast portal and Fancast.

Inform Technologies provides a simple yet crucial task for media companies. Inform processes the millions of pages of content on media sites, and automatically identifies people, companies, places, organizations and products as they appear in the news. The product’s semantic technology is able to tag data and establish relationships between different data and news content. To date, the company has raised close to $30 million in funding.

Straight out of left field, the Joost Video Network has assumed the number 2 spot in comScore’s Video Metrix “Top 100 Properties”, second only to Google.

The Joost network, which is now operated by Adconion after the company’s acquisition of the ill-fated European startup’s assets back in November 2009, claims a reach of 67 million unique viewers per month.

To put that in perspective: that’s approximately 38 percent of the total US Internet population who are consuming videos each month.

According to Adconion’s press release, the Joost Video Network, which consists of hundreds of major video destination sites, showed an aggregate of over 100 million videos to consumers in February. Perusing through the current selection of channels on Joost.com, I’m fairly surprised that the network is drawing so many views, as it consists mainly of niche video destinations that I would estimate only a small number of people would be interested in.

Apparently, at least according to comScore, the long tail in online video is really long.

Update: a commenter says:

Adconion have been delivering “video” ads as rich media banners. Effectively embedding video creatives into standard 300×250 display units – and doing this under the brand of “Joost”. This number is therefore a measure of the reach of Adconion’s rich media display network, and is in no way connected to the numbers of viewers watching video content on the joost portal.

This is correct – comScore Video Metrix is a report of consumer video consumption of both content and ads across the Web. Nevertheless, the same goes for Google and a host of other video networks in the list of top 100 properties, so the position of the Joost Video Network on that ranking is still highly notable. Even if just for potential advertisers.

Today, the international audience and content network operator is launching a suite of online video advertising products and services, targeting agencies and brand marketers who might be interested in running in-banner and in-stream video advertising on the Joost Video Network.

Video destination site Joost.com, meanwhile, will remain up and running (gotta love that ‘beta’ tagged logo) and will be used as a portal to showcase and distribute branded entertainment content.

Here’s how Nick Higgins, director of global video at Adconion, pitches the new offering:

“Adding this product offering gives Adconion a distinguished position among ad networks, as we are the only provider with in-banner and in-stream capabilities; an exclusive relationship with a branded entertainment studio; in-house creative services; and a video portal, Joost.com, that we own, operate and sell exclusively.”

Adconion stresses that this is the first product from the combined entity formed when Adconion acquired Joost’s assets. Since then, Adconion has integrated its ad server with the Joost video player and is the exclusive video ad provider for Joost.com and the Joost video player in its embedded form. Adconion also touts its exclusive relationship with the RedLever studio for the content side of the equation. The two companies say that will work with agencies and marketers to develop fresh content, from advertisements to webisodes.

According to the press release, the Joost Video Network will serve video ads on Adconion’s network, which self-reportedly spans 2,000 premium publishers in more than 70 markets worldwide. Adconion claims it is capable of reaching more than 350 million unique users across the globe.

All in all, it seems like Adconion made a good move by throwing Joost a lifeline, though I’d love to know what they ended up paying for the assets of the massively hyped venture.

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.You can also read his series on the state of Online video (Parts I, II, III, and IV) video..

Yesterday’s final implosion of video site Veoh, which declared bankruptcy after burning through $70 million of venture capital, was a long time coming. A lot of so-called smart money went into Veoh: investors included Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Intel’s venture arm, Spark Capital and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Joost, another high-flying video startup launched by the founders of Skype, went through $45M in VC money before ending up in a fire sale.  Who’s next?

More importantly, why is so much venture capital that funded video startups going down the drain when the number of videos watched on the Web is going through the roof?

Nowadays, it is fashionable to discredit VCs as financial engineering hacks with no operational talent who lack the moral compass required to lead people; but that would be unfair. VCs, it turns out, are neither the problem nor the solution: good ones might offer more than cash, bad ones will kill your business.  And once killed, they’ll blame everything and anyone but themselves.

Fish Out of Water

Last year I was speaking about raising capital with a fellow CEO, Brightroll’s CEO Tod Sacerdoti, and he mentioned that the “video industry is more media than technology”, to which I added, “that is why VCs come across like fish out of water”.

Indeed, most VCs tend to lack any meaningful background in advertising, publishing, sales or media.  Selling software doesn’t cut it.  Building chips is irrelevant.

In fact, the very same things that make technology companies successful are often weaknesses and even threats to media companies.  For example, a tech company’s contract for recurring licensing fees is not as attractive as a series of contracts for recurring advertising deals. This merits a post in of itself, but the kinds of things that VCs were drawn to in video have all become commodities, namely: video aggregators, content delivery networks and content management systems, which are capital intensive, low margin areas always at the risk of getting cancelled and shifted to a competitor.

Making things worse is this “crazy ass backwards” investment thesis that they should invest in 10 companies and watch seven burn to the ground, hope that two do “ok”, and pray that one will be a “grand slam”.  Forget the theory of diversification, which underpins all of finance, VCs keep aiming for the fence and let’s face it, finding winners in business is as hard as finding them in Hollywood.  You win with singles, doubles, triples and occasioanlly home runs. basing your strategy on grand slams is futile, which takes us to VCs odious track record in online video.  Online video startups tend to fall in one of the following categories, with some overlaps:

1. Content management system (CMS) platform technology companies
2. Advertising creation and management companies
3. Content aggregation and distribution
4. Video file hosting and sharing
5. Video content editing
6. Content producers
7. Content delivery network (CDN)

Where are the grand slams other than YouTube?  There aren’t any.

The Elusive Media VC

True media VCs just don’t exist.  One explanation could be that most high ranking media executives who were working in big media with high salaries but little or no equity, never experienced the massive paydays that would give them a path to investing their own money and subsequently setting up a fund to invest on behalf of others.  There are exceptions, of course.

But the entrepreneurs who have made fortunes in media tend to reinvest in their own empires rather than dole out the money to potential startup competitors.  Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, William Randolph Hearst, Sumner Redstone, SI Newhouse and the like who never sold out retained their earnings and built empires.  Once they became the Establishment, it made little sense for them to finance the disruption.

Mr. Murdoch (who bought the company that bought my last company) bought MySpace when it was convenient, generated a windfall from the Google deal, and now that its fortunes have soured, he is divesting from the medium: first Photobucket, then Rotten Tomatoes.

Conversely, most VCs were technology founders and executives who sold companies and came into cash.  They set up or joined VC funds to reinvest their money and continue the cycle of disruption.

The Web is Entering a Period of Massive Content Consumption.

There seems to be a massive wedge between media and technology.  One side doesn’t get the other and the result is wasted investment dollars.

“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Universal Music Chairman Doug Morris once explained. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

Well, alternatively, VCs have no clue where the advertising money will go in media but all VCs seek to invest in the Google of Video. Incidentally, Google’s initial business model was based on licensing its search technology, a unit which generated hundreds of millions of dollars.  But today, Google is foremost an ad-supported business.  However, it’s one of the only successful ad-supported technology businesses in the world.

Google lucked out by benefitting from a perfect storm and is now limited by its free, ad-supported worldview (Apple understands that if there is one thing people love to do is actually spend money – but again, separate post).

Regardless of whether the Internet will be larger on Mobile or PC, the nuts and bolts are starting to matter less than the content that is consumed, and how that content is monetized.  More likely than not, the model will be advertising based.  Today, fickle media companies have less faith in ad models, but consumers continue to shun paying for content.

Regardless, VCs keep investing in the next crapstr, whereas they should be investing in content, which is missing piece for advertising to take off in online video.

Content is King

“The real barrier is content and the model necessary to make more of it.  Cable TV suffered from this same fate early on”, states Broadband Enterprises’ Matt Wasserlauf.

We’re still in the early days of online video content and history is repeating itself.  The film industry initially recreated theater and added a camera to record plays; early TV recreated radio and added a camera as well.  Online video content has much room for improvement, but what is missing is the kind of investment required to create compelling content.  VCs keep throwing out cliché after cliché and just show their lack of understanding of that fact. Sure, some of the aggregators such as Veoh did scale quickly but it wasn’t all that defensive.  Despite all of this, VCs seem to be making all of the same mistakes over and over again: investing in the technology and not in the content.

Photo credit: Flickr/Umberto Salvagnin

Zennström said he found it encouraging to find that so many European entrepreneurs and startups are busy building innovative things in Europe too, and that conferences and Le Web are a great way to bring everyone together.

He talked about his most successful venture to date, Skype, and also acknowledged that mistakes were made building other companies like Kazaa and Joost. Unsurprisingly, he regards those mistakes as valuable lessons rather than failures.

Zennström said being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, and requires complete dedication. Real company builders should forget about spare time and hobbies, and prepare for a lot of sweat and hard work. On the other hand, he said, riding that wave can prove to be very rewarding.

The entrepreneur turned venture capitalist / entrepreneur left his job together with Janus Friis back in 2000, funnily enough on the same day NASDAQ peeked. P2P technology back then was regarded as the next big thing, like realtime at present, and something else in two years.

First lesson that he learned: to be successful in business, you have to believe. Sometimes, you’ll be the only one who believes, but you need to be strong and passionate in order to see things through.

Zennström and Friis saw Kazaa grow quickly in terms of users and installs, but they consider themselves now to have been ahead of the time. Zennström acknowledged that mistakes were made and opportunities missed, particularly in terms of working together with record companies for business development.

The vision for Skype came when the duo saw broadband getting critical mass, and that their technology would fit right in there. They knowingly went after a large industry they considered needed fixing, and figured if they could just take one percent they’d be successful, mainly because of the high margins in that industry.

Skype grew really quickly, but it was bootstrapped for a long time. In fact, Zennström said Skype had a lot of trouble getting interest from venture capitalists in Europe because of the risk involved, and mulled talking to VCs based in the United States. Ultimately, they stuck to Europe, also because it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to travel to the U.S. because of pending litigation from the Kazaa days.

Zennström said Skype was always a global company, and more European companies should be thinking that way, try to build distribution partnership across borders. They should make their own path and swim against the tide, he adds.

The Swedish entrepreneur also said there’s a misconception that Europe is bad at building very big companies, and that it’s mainly an issue in the high-tech and Internet sector. He referred to companies like Louis Vuitton and Ikea as counter-examples, and pointed out that most of these companies never took venture capital to grow.

Zennström said Europeans generally don’t have the right mindset for entrepreneurship, and that they are too risk averse. There’s also the issue of brain drain, European entrepreneurs moving to Silicon Valley, which he thinks will become less of a problem in the future. He also lamented the fact that European tend to stigmatize failure. Success, after all, is not a pre-defined formula.

Europe has other problems too, according to Zennström. Too complicated to set up companies, hire and fire people, and so on. The EU has so far been unable to adequately address that problem.

Zennström did say that he thinks the trends are changing now, and that more success will come. He praises conferences such as Le Web, the fact that entrepreneurs are starting to connect more and come more agile and less averse to changing the business strategy if necessary, and that there are more role models for aspiring entrepreneurs.

In the end of his talk, Zennström said there’s no Silicon Valley in Europe, but that he’s convinced we do not need one either.

Last June, Joost announced a change in its business strategy to focus on providing white-label video platforms, and Adconion says it plans to pursue this strategy. Notably, Adconion recently announced its first long-term licensing partnership as the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for the Goldbach Media Group in Europe.

We had earlier put Joost on death watch, not in the least when its UK offices were dissolved and there was virtually no one left to comment on that story. It’s also worth noting that this morning’s news comes a mere two weeks after it was announced that Friis and Zennström had settled its lawsuits against eBay, the investor group that was purchasing Skype from eBay, early Joost backers Index Ventures and the online video company’s former CEO Mike Volpi.

On a sidenote: Index Ventures also happens to be a major investor in Adconion, having led its $80 million Series C round raised back in February 2008.

In a statement, Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius says about the Joost purchase: “Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution.”

Moebius added that the company would be contuining to operate Joost.com, providing clients with a destination site to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment content.

Prior to the acquisition, Adconion offered targeted distribution of content, including video and TV commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV. Through the Joost acquisition, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll ads across 2,000 publishers. Adconion claims to reach nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis.

As for Joost, here’s how Michael Arrington so eloquently put it when the company said it would be refocusing its business last Summer:

Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure – celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.

And the two Scandinavian entrepeneurs who co-founded Joost are now definitely moving on, having regained a stake and board seats in the new Skype and ready to launch a ‘new breed’ of online music service.

There are loads of interesting nuggets in the documents, which are well worth a read if you’re as fascinated by the whole thing as we are. For instance, would you have guessed both Facebook and multiple members of the Apache Software Foundation played an interesting role in this particular part of the story?

To understand why, you need to understand what the lawsuit against Volpi, brought on by Joost and Skype’s initial founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, is actually about.

According to the two European entrepreneurs / enfants terribles, Volpi (pictured) has systematically breached his fiduciary duties at Joost to become the next Chairman of Skype if it were to be effectively sold to the new investor group that has agreed to acquire the company from current owner eBay.

This group also includes Volpi’s current employer Index Ventures by the way, which is being sued by the Skype founders separately.

The allegations span three core issues: the misappropriate use of confidential information gained at Joost in an effort to entice the buy-out group to join Index Investors in a play for Skype, a misuse of the same confidential information for plans to revamp Skype’s technology in the long run, and the attempts made by Volpi to lure key Joost engineers with knowledge of JoltId’s intellectual property (GI or Global Index, the peer-to-peer protocol technology developed and owned by Friis and Zennström) to the new Skype.

The third part is where Facebook comes in, albeit indirectly.

In July 2009, then-CEO of Joost Mike Volpi according to the court documents – which includes evidence in the form of e-mail communications and more – arranged a meeting between Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer and Joost Chief Architect Justin Erenkrantz (pictured) to offer him a potential job at the new Skype.

Erenkrantz was deemed one of the online video startup’s “most valued engineers” by the company’s founders in the case.

Just for your reference, Erenkrantz is an ex-Google engineer, current President of the Apache Software Foundation and former treasurer of the association.

In addition to Erenkrantz, Volpi allegedly undertook attempts to poach Sander Striker, Director of Engineering at Joost and also a member of the ASF.

The goal of the meeting with Erenkrantz, held at an industry conference, was to have him take a look at the current endeavors within eBay to develop a technology work-around for the P2P technology intellectually owned by JoltId and get his feedback, and to assess if he would be a good new member of the Skype diligence team (pending acquisition) and the new company’s technical team after the deal was done. Soon after, an official offer to Erenkrantz was made by Volpi.

The reason why that irked Friis and Zennström tremendously, the court docs show, was because they went to great lengths to retain Erenkrantz at Joost when Facebook – after Amazon – offered the man an engineering position at the social networking company, costing Joost a lot of money. They had managed to keep him from taking a job as software developer at Google after two internships there when they first hired him, and he was clearly a very valuable asset for the company.

Straight from the docs (also embedded below):

Although Volpi’s efforts to poach both of these Joost employees were equally unlawful, his overtures to Mr. Erenkrantz were particularly threatening. As Volpi was aware, Joost had recently expended significant effort and company resources to retain him – in the face of an offer for Mr. Erenkrantz to join Facebook.

As Joost founder Janus Friis write in a June 5, 2009 e-mail to Volpi: “I spoke to Justin Erenkrantz yesterday. Given the concerns about loosing [sic] him and the signficant ripple effects it could case,” Mr. Friis sought Volpi’s approval in paying him a substantial retention bonus, increasing his salary, and offering him a position as a part-time technical consultant for Joltid. Volpi concurred in these retention efforts, and having supported Joost’s bid to keep Mr. Erenkrantz from joining Facebook, nonethless attempted to lure Mr. Erenkrantz away from Joost a month later.

For what it’s worth: Friis and Zennström, who are still eager to buy back Skype themselves, seem to have Erenkrantz on their side in this matter. This is unsurprising, because he doubles as a consultant for Joltid at the moment, but it doesn’t bode well for Volpi in this case. In a declaration, Erenkrantz unambiguously supports the Skype founders’ motion for preliminary injunction (also embedded below).

Business, egos, lawsuits and emotions. It’s like watching Dallas!

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
PI Brief – PUBLIC –

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
Declaration of Justin Erenkrantz In Support of PI –

Little is known about the ‘secretive’ startup, and its website reveals nothing but the logo at this point. NYT reporter Brad Stone writes that the upstart boasts offices in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and that it’s going to offer a paid subscription-based music consumption and purchasing platform for both PCs and mobile phones, starting early next year.

Like other startups in this field (MOG, Spotify, Deezer and many others), the main challenge for Rdio will be to get the major players from the recording industry on board to supply music to its online catalog without fear of copyright infringement litigation. Needless to say, that’s a hard and expensive nut to crack, and any executive from the labels who hasn’t forgotten and/or forgiven Friis and Zennström for creating Kazaa will be wary before signing any type of agreement with Rdio. Nevertheless, Rdio CEO Drew Larner tells the NYT that talks with music labels are “continuing and confidential”, which an exec at EMI for one confirmed.

A quick Internet search appears to identify Larner as former director at Zoo Entertainment, and before that a Managing Director of Europlay Capital Advisors and Executive VP at Spyglass Entertainment Group. A search on LinkedIn only turns up Malthe Sigurdsson, a London-based designer who used to be creative director at Skype. Another interesting tidbit: they seem to own the domain name rd.io as well.

Friis and Zennström have been keeping busy starting lawsuits lately: first they sued Skype owner eBay over core technology used in the VoIP service that they own, then they filed a copyright suit against eBay and the investor group that is going to buy Skype from them, and then they went on to sue former Joost chairman and CEO Mike Volpi.

You have to wonder where they find the time to set up and back new startups in between.

The Skype-eBay plot thickens. Joost and Joltid, both companies owned by Skype’s founders, have filed a lawsuit against former Joost chairman and CEO, Mike Volpi. The suit also names Index Ventures, the VC firm where Volpi is a partner. In a nutshell, the legal documents say that Volpi obtained confidential information in his role as CEO of Joost about how to circumvent Joltid’s IP. We’ve embedded the legal document that appears to have been filed this morning, below.

Earlier this week, Joltid, the Swedish firm owned by founders of Skype sued eBay and recent Skype buyer Silver Lake Partners and its partners in the buyout, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board; accusing them of copyright violations. The twist: Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom also founded Joost and Volpi, Joost’s former chairman and CEO who left the imploding company in June to become a partner at Index Ventures, has been rumored to be a contender for Skype’s CEO position.

While Friis and Zennstrom named Volpi as a defendant in the earlier suit against eBay, it appears that the new suit against Volpi alleges leaking of trade secrets from Joost, breach of contract and “civil conspiracy.”

So what does this all mean? It’s a little complicated and slightly twisted. Yesterday, TechCrunch’s Robin Wauter’s reported that Skype is actively shopping around for companies that provide web-based communication services such as browser-based calling and video chats to add this functionality to the product. What the complaint basically implies is that at Joost, Volpi had access and knowledge of information regarding the ability for the peer-to-peer technology to go to the web. In his role at Joost, Volpi knew how it could be possible to make the switch to a web-based communication service within the source code. This source code is intellectual property owned by Joltid. The reason the bid from the consortium of bidders was so high, was because they all has knowledge (from Volpi and participant Index Ventures) that its possible for Skype to go web-based.

The complaint goes on to say that Google and Microsoft were considering buying Skype and were both aware of the ability for Skype to possibly add web-based functionality but didn’t want to touch it because of the complicated IP situation, since Joltid owns the code. All of that said, the complaint doesn’t have any affidavits or direct evidence that Volpi used this info in the bid to buy Skype.

eBay sold Skype in a deal valuing the peer-to-peer telephony service at $2.75 billion a few weeks ago, with the new investors owning approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%. Several months ago, Skype’s founders made their intentions public by announcing they wanted to buy Skype back from eBay. Shortly after this announcement, eBay announced that Skype was to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO.

From a press release issued by Joost/Joltid this morning:

The lawsuit alleges breach of fiduciary duty against Volpi, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty against Index, interference with prospective business advantage, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract against Index, breach of confidence, and civil conspiracy. The suit seeks an injunction requiring the defendants to return to the plaintiffs all documents and files containing confidential information that the lawsuit alleges was misappropriated from Joost, and enjoining the defendants from making any use of the alleged misappropriated trade secrets, among other things.

Update: More TechCrunch commentary on this story here.

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
Joost –

With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.

Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum.

Magnify has recently partnered with several sites to power their video aggregation platforms, including deals with Etsy, CarsonDaly.TV, and Bicycling.com. Magnify has also created white label video channels for Zappos, New York Magazine and The Weather Channel.

Bicycling.com recently decided to shift from Magnify’s competitor Brightcove to power its platform for original content. The cycling site is launching its Magnify-powered site in conjunction with its coverage of the Tour de France, which starts July 4th. It was attracted by Magnify’s social features, such as the ability to pull UGC videos from sites like YouTube and updates from Twitter. Bicycling.com online editor David L’Heureux plans to integrate Twitter streams onto the platform from cycling all-stars like Lance Armstrong. Magnify also allows the online magazine to aggregate a mix of videos and makes it easy for the site to offer readers external videos and internal media that is created by Bicycling.com.

Additionally, Magnify is creating subject-driven channels, such as IranLive, that aggregates video content around a specific topic and also integrates live Twitter streams with the mentions of that topic. The IranLive Twitter stream has filters that remove any Tweets with derogatory or abusive language.

What does the Joost white-label service do again?

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash – until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.

And this new business focus for Joost – white label video platforms – is a very tough market. Yahoo just bailed on it entirely after investing $160 million or so in an acquisition of Maven Networks last year. And competitors like Brightcove and Ooyala aren’t just going to roll over and let Joost take market share in this space.

Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure – celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.

Update: forgot to mention that you need an invite code to download the software for now. Fortunately, we get to give away no less than 15,000 for TechCrunch readers. Code: PUMP-TECHCRUNCH-USA-15000.

PUMP is a desktop application that lets you search for and download the Flash versions of videos from a variety of services, including YouTube, Dailymotion, BitTorrent search engine Mininova, Jamendo, LegalTorrents and Google Torrent, and the results are presented in orderly tabs. You can even opt to include any other search engine you think is missing from the list. Videos can be played in practically any format and shared from within the interface on a multitude of social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. The app even doubles as a full-fledged Web browser and podcasting tool thanks to the ability to import RSS feeds into the system.

It makes for easy management and discovery of videos, but what I really dig about the service is that is able to sync and convert content from both your imported iTunes and local PUMP libraries to your iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile phones. It’s also a full-fledged BitTorrent client, which is little surprising considering VIPeers is also the company behind torrent sharing client Podmailing. Of course, we would never suggest that you’d be using PUMP to download any copyrighted content or anything.

The downsides: only available for Windows Vista and XP for now (it also uses IE for browsing), an uninspired UI and a bit of a memory drain. But don’t let that spoil the fun.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4457679&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog, theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feeds, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious.

Earlier this year, Joost was added to the Boxee media directory, but I think this is a more significant partnership.

Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, and it has famously replaced leading local social networks in many countries in Europe and Arabic speaking regions as community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Targeting mostly young people, it’s been actively looking to expand its array of entertainment services, most recently with the addition of multi-player games and now with videos from Joost. I think both will benefit from this and further anchor their position in Europe while everyone seems to be looking at what happens in the U.S and Asia.

Netlog raised €5 million from Index Ventures in April 2007. For the sake of comparison, Joost raised $45 million, coincidentally in part from the same investor, who we recently reported raised a new €350 million venture fund.

Miro, an open-source HD video player we wrote about in 2007, launched Miro 2.0, an updated, re-designed, more powerful video player.

Several new features have been added to spruce up Miro, including faster performance and torrent downloads, the ability to stream shows from websites like Hulu and YouTube on the sidebar,and the ability to play videos in a separate video. Similar to the 1.0 version, Miro allows users to search for and download video podcasts from sources but Miro is offering a greater selection of video podcasts for users. Miro, a BitTorrent-enabled, Firefox-like open-source application was built by non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation and boasts of more than 4 million downloads in 2008.

Miro is in direct competition with video player Joost and lists all of its advantages over its rival here. Perhaps the recent make-over of Miro isn’t just an update of the application but also a move to keep up with the growth its competitor has seen in the past few months. Joost’s viewership recently picked up steam after the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience.

A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.

If this data is accurate (at least the three services agree on dramatic growth), Hulu may have a competitor coming up from behind, even as they look ahead to YouTube.

Joost’s two year old online video service was a pretty darned smart idea when it first launched.

Instead of streaming video through the Joost website, users would download a Mozilla-based client and watch it there instead. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. And more importantly, the Joost client had built in person-to-person file sharing. That meant Joost had lower bandwidth bills. It also meant that Joost didn’t need to worry about overloading servers while showing live events – users would just grab the stream from others automatically.

But Joost bet wrong, as the whole world, led by YouTube and then Hulu, got comfortable with Flash as the delivery method for video. Showing video on Flash meant users could deep link to specific videos, and also embed stuff they liked on their own sites. With the benefit of hindsight it all seems sort of obvious.

Joost adapted, though, giving users the option of an all-Flash site in September. Some international users would still be required to use the software to reduce bandwidth costs, and the company was hoping U.S. users would eventually install it, too.

Today they announced they’re discontinuing the software application altogether, but they aren’t saying why. It’s clear that Joost’s strategy has been fluid over the last few months as they try to figure out a way to compete with the much more successful Hulu. It’s honestly not clear that they really can. Joost doesn’t offer anything particularly unique or compelling to users over competing sites with proprietary content (Hulu with Fox and NBC, TV.com with CBS).

Joost raised a big $45 million round of financing way back in 2006. It’s not clear how much of that is left. If they want to succeed they’re going to have to do something pretty radical.