Joost Blog

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”
- David Bowie

One of the great things about working at a startup is the ability to be flexible and make changes when our users, trends or data suggest a new direction. For much of the past year, we’ve listened to the feedback we’ve received from many of the people who use Joost, making decisions about what makes our product and our company special, and building a new product based on those recommendations.

For those of us who work for Joost, today marks the day when we begin to test our new strategy, product and design with you. You’ll probably notice a lot of changes.

The first change is pretty clear – you can now watch video directly in your web browser. You still get the great quality video you expect – but you don’t have to launch a separate application to watch shows on Joost.

We’ve also made it a lot easier for you to find shows on Joost. One of our greatest strengths is that we have the biggest library of legal video available on the internet – more than 35,000 videos today. Until now, however, it’s been an “embarrassment of riches” so to speak. Unless you knew exactly what you’re looking for, it was difficult to find something you wanted to watch on Joost.

We’ve made two improvements that make finding what you want to watch a lot easier. The first is our new programming guide. We’ve divided all of our 35,000 videos into three categories: Shows, Music and Film. You can find links to each of these categories at the top of every page on Joost.

Then we’ve classified each video even further so you can get specific with your search. Let’s say you are in the mood for some anime – you can click on Shows, narrow down the search to the Animation sub-genre, and then browse through the Anime category.

But there’s more. I’ve been writing a bit recently about the role that recommendations from your friends, colleagues and family play in determining what we choose to watch on TV or in the theater. If a friend tells you he likes a certain up-and-coming artist, you’ll probably listen to a song or watch a music video to find outif you like the artist too.

We’ve incorporated a lot of social features on Joost that begin to imitate the watercooler environment on the web. Today, as I watch Joost, everything I watch is posted in my JoostFeed – and that feed is also sent out to my friends. If I like something, I might comment on it, favorite it, or even shout at it (a quick and easy way to tell my friends what I think about a particular video).

Why does this matter? Well, to my friends – people who are interested in what I do, or the things I like – the fact that I favorited Disturbia here might prompt them to the video too. Then we might discover that we both like to listen to Rihanna while we're at work. So maybe we'll join (or form) a group; in this case, maybe we'll join the I Listen to Music While I Work group. As more people join our group, the shows they watch, the comments they write and the videos they favorite will give us a never-ending list of shows and videos we might be interested in checking out.

We’ll still be making a lot of changes in the next month. For the time being, we’re conducting our testing with the Joost Plugin – a small, proprietary install – which will become part of our ”premium” version. This version will allow us to show high-def and LIVE programming, and we’ll also use it in some international markets.

Sometime in October, we’ll introduce Joost ”standard,” which will include all the new social features of Joost. The one difference (both versions are free) is that Joost standard will use a Flash player, so you won’t need to download anything to watch video.

The past months have been busy and exciting ones for the Joost team, and we’re looking forward to more of the same. As always, we look forward to your feedback.