In the betatest I click, watch for 2 or 3 minutes, listen some more time maybe, forget to switch off the sound sometimes so it stays running on the background while I work on the pc. But I do not watch tv. Why is it a pc betatest?
"The hardware to bring it to the television is not there yet. We are talking to the big consumer electronics companies but nothing has been finalized yet.. We need tv's with an ethernet plug in the back. That will take several years, so we'll do it under Windows, than Mac and Linux until then.. But much to our surprise the average testers are watch it for about 100 minutes, they keep it on for one or two hours."
Do they really watch Joost?
"Our betatest shows although that people are connected very long times. Also they skip forwards and backwards meanwhile. They are surprisingly loyal; to our surprise they start watching it and when the item or event is over, they do not zap away, but they stay on the channel. That's partly because the channels are well programmed."
Or because navigating is still not easy?
"We don't see that. The user interface is understood well by testers. But it's 3 months old and we need maybe another two years to develop it to really become proper. Its very embryonic."
What's the next step with Joost?
"A lot of logistics, rolling out fiber, data centers, a whole lot of equipment in the network. And transcoding video from tapes and dvd's, compressing it to get it online. A lot of work behind the scenes."
How is the network build up?
"Our main datacenter is in Luxembourg from where we broadcast into the internet. From there it is connected with a range of relay points all around the world to support the system.
A desperate task?
"It works if you're patient. But it's no fun."
Already IPTV companies have lots of difficulties to build up their sixty channels and offer some on-demand content. How to get this right with your ten thousand channels?
"Right now we have about 30 channels and several hundreds of hours for each channel. We can grow in an order of magnitude. There will be a moment, next year possibly, when we have managed to get most of the historic rights of all the content we want to offer. From that moment it is more a matter of keeping up with the new programs on TV. I'm quite optimistic, but you don't do that with 5 or 10 people. We are with 180 now."
There is a major chicken-egg problem in this company: you need content to get people; you need people to get advertising and you need advertising to get the revenue for the content. That circle is not something you can solve immediately."
You see major problems for IPTV services as well, tv-companies not accepting just a revenue sharing model and just spending to start?
Porn not possible
"We take small steps, also the next year. When we activated the datacenter in Luxembourg, all our channels where instantly global. But as the peer to peer network is not yet fully active, that takes time, itnow takes maybe 5 or 6 seconds to change a channel if there are not enough peers in the surroundings."
Did you pay fixed amounts in advance?
"Of course the right owners try to get fixed payments, but we show them our global audience. While we could invest in content -right now the market seems strongly to prefer revenue sharing.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray struggle with porn as needed content for a breakthrough. How about Joost?
"We didn't license any porn content and we have no plans to do so in the future. First and foremost we want to offer normal TV. As a worldwide operator there are enough reasons to stay away from porn."
And user generated content?
"No, it's not the aim to take content from everybody. We do talk to independent individual producers, like documentary makers who can license their quality films, and give them a channel. We aim at very serious content."
So Joost believes in an 'elite' producing, other than YouTube, Flickr and other services relying on user generated content?
"the reason why tv stays on top, and viewing hours are still going up is because people want entertainment value on a high level. From tv you get involvement, emotion, other than download."
Philips and Sony
Partnering with electronics companies?
"Yes, to plug in ethernet."
Apple TV, PcZapper is acting, several Asian systems?
"People who are geeky enough to install those devices in their living room, definitely are our pioneer consumers. But it's not they way it's going to work in the longer term, people wiring their home. Because we aim at hundreds of millions of viewers. But in the devices will provide a start-up market to reach tv's with Joost. So we very much welcome those devices."
Are the Philips's, Sony's and JVC's hurrying, so we will see their Ethernet enabled tv's on the next CES in 2007?
"This requirement of Joost doesn't come much of a surprise for them. Each and every tv equipment maker has it on the drawing board. It's a matter of some strategic developments , ensuring enough memory and so on. We might see demo's this years, but it takes some years to get them on the shop shelves."
Peer-to-peer building is hard. You can't simulate it in the lab. It's takes months to build, trying and trying again. The ten years of real world experience invested in peer-to-peer is important,. But also the experience from the people we hired from MTV to deal with the rights.
For telephone you need only 8 kilobits, but if there is a delay of only some three hundreds of seconds, it breaks. Basically we need about 500 till 600 kilobit, and it needs to be steady. But it can drop, sometimes a package can drop out or arrive later. That's not problem. With phone calls it's much more of a problem. You won't even try to correct if you miss a word and will give up.
So compared to telephony Joost has in that way an easier time in correcting these kind of problems, but half a megabit is a pretty large chunk of a 2 megabit adsl-light connection. In that case we take 25 per cent which is pretty much.
Is Joost a stimulate for fiber optics home connections? Amsterdam Citynet f.e. is very enthusiastic about it?
"There are a whole of people selling bandwidth who are happy with any technology that drives up bandwidth demand. We need more bandwidth definitely. We went from ASCII with kilobytes to megabytes with photo's, to gigabits of connection for several video channels."
Is HDTV an aim?
"The network is agnostic, so it can do any bandwidth up till HDTV. We don't have HDTV licenses for public viewing, but it's the very logical next step. You need about 1 to 2 megabit which is no problem in Asia, but it is in the US and Europe."
Mobile?
"Also a logical steps. But there a lot of special needs for the mobile screen and connections."
