US media giant, Viacom, have struck a deal with Joost, the VOD TV to computer previously known as The Venice Project.
Joost is currently in beta, and it’s understood that the Viacom material will be available for the yet-undefined launch date of Joost. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Joost users will have financially-free access to the content. Joost users will ‘pay’ by being shown brief adverts, that we call blip-verts. They only last a couple of seconds and aren’t _that_ offensive, if the video pieces that are being watched aren’t too short.
The Viacom channels covered by the deal are MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike TV, Logo and BET.
Clearly Philippe Dauman, Viacom President and Chief Executive Officer, is showing his excitement at being involved, “We’re extremely pleased to be working with Joost, and couldn’t be prouder to be a key partner in the launch of the next generation in broadband video technology.” He’s not looking at the Joost deal as an exclusive though, “we’re determined to keep pushing and growing our digital presence and bring our programming to audiences on every platform and device that they want. In addition to strong partnerships we have with traditional distributors, we will continue to seek out partners like Joost, which has created an exciting breakthrough platform that represents not only a fantastic user experience, but one that is built on a compelling and sustainable business model that respects both content creators and consumers.”
All of this comes only a couple of week after Viacom threw their legal department at YouTube, insisting that they remove their content from the video sharing site and accused Google-owned YouTube of knowingly profiting from material stolen from them.
Joost recently introduced a version of Joost to run on Apple’s Mac. Version 0.8.0.1 for Mac came out on Monday, following a brief period in Alpha test. They describe it as looking “very much like Joost for Windows, while behaving very much like a Mac application.” A growing number of Mac Beta testers are complaining that the software only works on Intel-based Macs.