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The online video service Joost has killed off its desktop software client, telling users to instead access the service through the website — much the way Hulu, Tv.com and others are doing.
The demise of the Joost desktop client (which will officially shut down Friday, Dec 19) is in many ways very predictable, after all, why require a separate download when the very same video can be seen the in the browser elsewhere?
But part of the buzz surrounding Joost's launch (aside from the fact that it involved the creator of Skype) was that the company planned to use peer-to-peer networks to distribute video, rather than the client-peer network it has switched to now.
So what does that mean for peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution? While many have been quick to seize on Joost's move as a sign that P2P distribution will ultimately fail, the concept is still quite healthy.
It's the ability to make money off of a P2P business that, thus far anyway, is not quite as healthy.
While the darknet of bittorrent file swapping continues largely unabated, and many large open source software manufacturers rely on P2P distribution, so far, outside of Skype, there aren't many financial success stories to be found in P2P technologies.
That said, don't count P2P out just yet, its real success might be exactly where Joost is headed — in the browser.
Adobe has already taken some preliminary steps to build P2P capabilities into its Flash Player. With a new developer framework called Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) Adobe is enabling developers to use P2P tools inside Flash. At the moment RTMFP isn't intended for large scale streaming (think video conferencing, not YouTube), but there's nothing to stop Adobe from moving it in that direction.
The only problem with P2P video in the browser is that it's unlikely to ever be a complete solution — sites will still need to host all those videos that currently have no peers available. In other words, P2P would make a nice fallback scenario, a way for companies to cut costs on the top 5 percent of their content — the most popular videos.
Given that Joost was very vocal about its early P2P model, it's possible will the company be offering some sort of P2P distribution through a browser plugin or the like, but so far Joost hasn't given users any indications of what to expect, save that now Joost looks a lot more like Hulu.
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