Joost signs major advertisers for TV-over-Web plan
Joost, the Internet TV company founded by Europe's top Web entrepreneurs, has taken a big step towards commercial viability by signing up 31 advertisers worldwide ahead of the launch of its free service.
The company, aiming to become a new kind of global cable TV network on the Web, was started last year by Niklas Zennstrom and partner Janus Friis, founders of Web phone company Skype, now owned by eBay, and music-sharing site Kazaa.
Joost, which is testing the service ahead of a public introduction expected in coming months, aims to combine TV-like viewing with the wide choice and user control of the latest generation of Web services. L33tdawg: I finally got an invite into the Joost beta program the other day and had a chance to play with it a little. After an intial crash (it is beta after all) I found it did work rather well even on a 1Mbps connection. The only problem however was that you'd still encounter stop-start play back and would need to pause the clip after it loads in order to allow for some buffering time. Apart from that, it was pretty impressive :) I wish there was a way to tweak the settings for the client though - a simple option of allowing for a longer buffer time would be a real help. ;)
