Somewhere in PR heaven, another angel just got its wings. How else can you crown the success of the flack who managed to dump this puff piece on CIO magazine, titled ”Skype Founders Unveil YouTube Killer.” It’s so wrong on so many levels we don’t know where to start. Actually we do know where to start:

Firstly, if you are going to kill YouTube, you have to examine why YouTube is so popular. It runs on every browser, and every OS that supports Flash. ‘Joost’ only runs on high-end Windows PCs. But wait, there’s more:

De Wahl said Joost will replicate the complete television experience and ultimately fill a critical gap in online entertainment. “It will allow viewers to access all kinds of television over the Internet,” he said.

YouTube is also successful because it has loads of content (much of it illegal). Joost? They’ve been having some serious issues getting anything licensed. It gets even better though:

And how will it all work? Joost will use the kind of file-sharing architecture that powers Skype.

[...]

According to the London-based company, Joost will be “piracy proof” and capable of streaming video at broadcast resolutions, unlike other online-video services such as YouTube.

It’s interesting that they don’t mention that the founders of Skype were previously the founders of another famous company called Kazaa. You may have heard of it since it was a massive P2P filesharing system that was the YouTube-of-its-day. After they got their asses handed to them by irate copyright holders it seems that they’ve learned their lesson—sort of. They know now that they have to be anti-piracy but they are nuts if they think Hollywood will trust THEIR P2P network to be “piracy proof.”

Yeah, we’re the guys who created the Kazaa P2P technology but this time we promise to not let your products get stolen, no seriously.

Good luck on licensing all that content. So for those of keeping score at home:

YouTube runs everywhere, Joost only on new Windows boxes.
YouTube with tons of content, Joost with little-to-none.
Joost uses P2P technology originally used in massive file-piracy now claiming to be “piracy proof.”

Does that sound like a real YouTube killer to you?

(P.S.: on the plus side, Joost is higher quality than YouTube but its a pretty steep price they pay for improved images.)

Seth Steve Rosenbaum over at iMediaConnection makes an interesting argument on the future of TV:

So the future of TV is no longer about content creation, though there will be plenty of that. It is instead about content discovery-- finding media nuggets that are site-specific and user-friendly. Video discovery is at the heart of TV 2.0.

So, should Jeff, Les, or Bob be worried about their jobs? Actually, the answer is kind of yes because the media model that they manage is all about the economies of scale. Large networks deliver large audiences, which commands large dollar amounts. But the internet is about identifying, aggregating and monetizing small (but targetable) niches, and there’s little in the top-down media business that serves that purpose.

Conveniently, Seth is also CEO of Magnify.net which is a video search engine that aggregates the search facility of sites like Revver, YouTube, Yahoo! Video and Google Video.

Seth is only half right. It is true that the internet opens up the endless possibilities of specialized channels but he’s giving the traditional TV networks too much credit in the audience department. Most cable channels deliver pretty tiny audiences, so tiny in fact that many popular internet programs regularly attract larger audiences. MTV is dropping TRL for only having 300,000 viewers but Rocketboom has that many viewers daily.

Update: Thanks to Steve for pointing out his name isn’t Seth!

According to a study by media analysis firm Screen Digest, Web sites such as MySpace and YouTube will earn only a fraction of the advertising budgets available for more professional online programming.

“No single user-generated [video] site has really instilled a business model yet,” said Arash Amel, Screen Digest’s senior analyst. “The business model for user-generated sites has been ‘build it and sell it and let someone else worry about the business model’.”

With the recent shakeups at Revver and Guba it seems that the “someone else” has definitely been worrying about the business model. The question then becomes, why is user-generated video so hard to monetize? Didn’t Google just pay $1.65 Billion for YouTube?

Peter Chernin, News Corp president said at a recent conference: “We do not see big advertisers advertising with YouTube or MySpace. They have concerns about the content ... and there is no scarcity value for the content ... so there is very little ability to monetise video advertising on user-generated video.”

Now it all makes sense. Who knew that advertisers wouldn’t enjoy watching people’s cats dancing on tables as much as the rest of us?

You have all probably already read hundreds of “analyses” of Apple’s new iPhone. But what they all left out is why Apple’s device is so revolutionary.  As Ajit Jaokar so rightly points out, this has nothing to do with the slick technology in the phone itself:

The first supported carrier will be Cingular. Supported carrier? Since when did devices support carriers? Carriers support devices. Not the other way round! Hence, is the tail now wagging the dog?(Not necessarily a bad thing IMHO!)