Joost Blog

It’s been about six months since we launched the new Joost.com – so we thought this was an appropriate time to take a look at how we’re doing. And the news is good – we’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth, increasing our site traffic nearly five-fold since our launch. People are now watching a million hours of Joost video every month, and in March, there were more than 15 million video views.

But as seductive as statistics are, they don’t tell the whole story – or the most interesting one.

We have “committed” (in a nod to our engineers) an enormous number of changes to Joost in the past six months. We’ve spent a lot of time working on our content discovery tools, and while we’re not done yet, we’ve already improved our program listing; adding an A-Z list of all shows, music and film; enhanced our search functionality; and added a beta recommendation tool to help you find other shows that you might like. Which is good, because we’ve added a lot more content – from anime favorites like Naruto Shippuden to TV premieres like The United States of Tara – and outside of the U.S., we’ve added German and Dutch-language programming for people in those countries.

Our technological innovations don’t stop there. We broadcast our first live in-browser event – President Obama’s Inauguration – in January, and had people around the world participating in a live chat during the course of the day. We’ve added an embeddable player, which lets you embed Joost videos on your blog, and integrated with Facebook and Netlog to help you share the videos that you like with your existing social networks. We’ve partnered with a large number of third-party sites, search engines and device enablers, including Boxee, so you can find what you want to watch, and watch it anywhere. And we launched our iPhone/iPod Touch application, and now more than 1.5 million of you watch Joost videos on your iPhones and iPods.

At any one time, there are a number of projects that our staff is working on, and these are some of the changes you can expect to see in the coming months.

• We’re improving the quality of our video, to bring you more bit rate and dpi options. In the near future, we’ll have three streams that you can choose from – high quality, standard quality, and optimized quality.

• We’re continuing to play with the design of our website. We make subtle changes every week or so, based on our user feedback – and sometimes the changes are more significant. It’s safe to say that in a year, our site will look radically different than it does today.

• We’re pursuing an aggressive syndication strategy. While our focus is on the Joost experience on the computer, we’re working with a number of different partners to bring Joost to you via a number of different devices.

• And, of course, we continue to add new content partners to our library. In Europe, we’ll add more native-language programming, and will introduce native-language versions of Joost in some countries.

That’s just a partial list, because we’re not close to being done yet, and nothing, not brain-eating aliens, not cats on skateboards, and not rumors and speculation, will keep us from continuing on our mission to bring video to you over the internet. In the afterglow of the hype of our early days, we’ve had our fair share of critics, but we’re encouraged every day by the amount of feedback emails, tweets, Facebook comments and more that we receive from our fans. The team here continues to work hard, every day, to make Joost a success, and we thank you for your continued support.