However, checking in this morning on the social media accompanying the series? Disappointing. NBC is accompanying the show with some video extra features as well as some social media — but the efforts range from mildly entertaining to flat-out disjointed.

Starting with the good: Going through the Twitter messages from characters after the fact is kinda fun, especially given whomever is responsible for the social media campaign went to the trouble of making an account for relatively random characters (who may hold bigger secrets).

They’ve also done a decent job of modeling the fictional President’s Twitter account after the real Barack Obama account. And the touch of syndicating the real Twitter accounts of the cast on the NBC site is nice.

But beyond that, all that’s on the horizon for web content is some yet-to-come video “deconstructing” the show as well as two different sites: The Event is Coming and TruthSeeker. Here’s where things get annoying.

TruthSeeker is a so-far unutilized blog and Twitter account promising to reveal secrets from within the Martinez administration; creator Nick Wauters told TV Squad that the character behind TruthSeeker is a character who appeared in the pilot, and whose identity will be revealed at a later date. That’s fine — but on the night of the premiere, there’s only one blog entry and three pretty weak Twitter updates. Anyone hoping for real substantive content will find themselves disappointed.

Meanwhile, The Event is Coming is an incoherent hodgepodge of blog entries from the show’s producers and “in-game” news articles about President Martinez and his campaign. The News section is particularly disastrous. While there are one or two interesting clues to be found here — if you dig a little, for example, you’ll find out that the Alaskan detention facility was originally built in 1944 — there’s no narrative logic to the site, no justification for why this data is available alongside musings from the show’s producer.

Overall, looking at what’s in place so far is disappointing when compared to the eight different social media components that ABC’s FlashForward launched with last year, some of which represented truly inspired and engaging interactivity. In fact, with so many good examples of transmedia campaigns built to support mainstream properties, there’s almost something offensive about how artless this is.

Then again, FlashForward got canceled, and it’s a bit early to give up on the show (if only because — spoilers! — I do want to know what happened to that airplane). So we’ll just have to see how things evolve.

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While the Adconion Video Ad Network was just tenth in terms of potential reach, with 45.5 million unique viewers and 26.1 percent viewer penetration, the Joost Video Network had 38.3 percent penetration of online video viewers for actual reach delivered. That compares to BBE, with 18.3 percent actual reach, and BrightRoll, with 18.1 percent actual reach.

Adconion took that data and ran with it, calling itself the No. 2 video property in the comScore Video Metrix Top 100 Properties, claiming that the Joost Video Network reached 67 million viewers in February, or about 38 percent of U.S. Internet viewers watching online video. Claiming that it was second only to Google, Adconion says that it showed more than 100 million videos during the month.

The company also took the opportunity to talk a little bit of smack about its abilities as a video “network” as opposed to a video “portal,” like a YouTube or Hulu. In a press release, Adconion said:

“Whilst other “video” portals attract a large amount of unique visitors to their site/s, they cannot replicate the network effect of the Joost Video Network, which consists of hundreds of major video destination sites in aggregate.”

Of course, what it didn’t say was that most of the videos it delivered during the month were actually ads, not consumer entertainment. Furthermore, not all of those objects are what one might think of as online videos; while the Joost Video Network does deliver pre-, mid- and post-roll ads in-stream, the company also delivers a number of “videos” in banner advertisements that run on publisher sites. Even so, the pure numbers are impressive, especially for a company that most observers had written off as dead just a few months before.

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Adconion’s business is all about aggregating and guaranteeing large audiences for branded advertisements, and adding Joost gives it a pretty complete offering, one that ranges from creation to distribution of those ads on a massive scale. Adconion has a wholly owned production group called RedLever to create branded web content, and now with Joost.com it has a place to serve those videos. And Joost’s technology and syndication partnerships will help to distribute those messages out to other video sites.

Joost launched in 2007 with more than $45 million in funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Viacom, CBS and Chinese tycoon Li Ka-shing, but wasn’t able to make any money as an online video aggregator. Then it set its sights on providing video management and distribution services, but that didn’t pan out either. After running out of options, it sold to Adconion last November.

Joost wasn’t the only video aggregator to face tough times in recent months. Veoh, which had raised more than $70 million from investors like Adobe, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Spark Capital, Time Warner and Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company, recently filed for bankruptcy after failing to make a business out of its video destination site. And Babelgum made numerous cost-cutting moves late last year, including down some of its offices in Europe to streamline operations.

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We’ve summarized the years from 2000 to 2004 here, from the dotcom bust to the birth of user-generated content. This post will focus on the second half of the decade, starting in 2005. Once again, we’ll concentrate on a few major events and trends in an effort to make the history of online video bloggable.

2005 was the year when online video ceased to be a one-way street. Users had more and more cheap video recording equipment at hand and a flurry of new sites to help them share clips with friends and strangers alike. Blip.tv, Revver.com and Dailymotion all launched in 2005, as did a little site founded by three guys named Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. YouTube’s first video got uploaded on April 23rd, showing co-founder Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The site went into beta in May and officially launched in November.

Future YouTube owner Google also started to explore online video in ’05. The search engine began to allow users to upload clips to Google Video and sell them to end users, with the idea of eventually selling major TV content. AOL began to offer free, ad-supported full-length TV show episodes through its awkwardly named In2TV platform, but had to settle for oldies like Kotter and Wonder Woman because the networks were wary of releasing new content online. Slightly more promising wasan offer trialed by the BBC in the same year: The Beeb’s Integrated Media Player gave viewers the chance to catch up on much of its programming online within a seven-day window. The platform soon expanded and eventually became known as the iPlayer. 2005 also saw the launch of the Slingbox as well as the iPod Video, and Kevin Rose co-founded Revision3.

2006 was a year of validation for the online video space. Rocketboom landed its first ad deals in February, Sony bought video startup Grouper in August, and YouTube became an unstoppable force. Google bought the site in October for $1.65 billion.

2006 was also the year Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s data center. The move was meant to take the quickly growing torrent site offline, but it took the Bay only three days to come back, and the resulting world-wide publicity only heightened awareness of BitTorrent as a great way to get Hollywood fare for free. Other torrent sites profited as well, with Mininova becoming the ninth-most-searched word on Google that year. Forrester Research reported in April that 25 percent of all Internet users were watching videos online. That message was not lost on TV networks: ABC.com began streaming full episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives in the spring of ’06, and Amazon started selling TV show episodes as well as movies later that year.

2007 brought us the first version of Joost, the online video venture of the Kazaa and Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, and with it tens of thousands of would-be users frantically searching for invites. This enthusiasm got a little more muted when those users eventually got access to the service, only to discover technical issues and lack of content. Joost also quickly got competition from a bunch of established players: Netflix launched its Watch Now VOD service in early 2007, and Hulu premiered its website with a closed beta test in the fall of the same year, instantly winning over many skeptics. The BBC also revamped its iPlayer service and launched a web-based Flash version in December.

Other remarkable moments in 2007 included Steve Jobs getting a new hobby in form of the Apple TV device as well as a foul-mouthed little girl starring in the inaugural video clip for Will Ferrell’s online venture Funny Or Die. Ferrel’s online gig, as well as the launch of Next New Networks, signaled that there was an increasing opportunity for professionally produced online content.

2008 was the year of the XXIX Olympics, held in China and broadcasted all over the world not only on TV, but also online. NBC served 75.5 million streams, the BBC had almost 200,000 people tuning in online at the same time, and Chinese P2P companies like PPLive topped it all with 820,000 viewers for the closing ceremony. Hulu officially opened its doors in March and quickly attracted an impressive user base, and Netflix started to stream to the XBox, while Sony offered movie rentals on the PS3.

Hollywood celebrated a victory against the U.S.-based torrent site TorrentSpy when a court ordered the site to pay $110 million in damages. However, P2P fans had something to celebrate as well when the FCC ordered Comcast to stop interfering with its customers’ BitTorrent traffic, something the cableco complied with by the end of the year.

Oh, and 2008 was also an election year, and online video was front and center this time around. New and remarkable was that the most effective commercials actually came from outsiders, such as the Will.I.Am song “Yes We Can” and the corresponding McCain parody “No You Can’t.”

2009 began with a record-shattering online video event when millions tuned in to watch the Obama inauguration online. The inauguration also redefined social video viewing, thanks to Twitter and Facebook. Hulu continued its rise to fame, and is now on track to reach a billion page views. Cable companies started to get uncomfortable about the free competition, and Comcast launched its own subscriber-only online TV platform before the end of the year.

The biggest video drama of 2009, however, was the trial against the founders of The Pirate Bay, which ended with a guilty verdict in April, prompting not only increased decentralization of BitTorrent, but also the bombshell announcement that the site would be sold. The buyer announced plans to legitimize The Pirate Bay, but quickly found himself at odds with the law  when his company got invested for insider trading and his assets were seized for tax evasion. The sale eventually fell through, and The Pirate Bay has been operating like nothing happened ever since, guaranteeing that we’ll have a lot more juicy pirate drama in the decade to come.

Check here for the first part of this article, and feel free to add anyting we forgot or tell us about your own most memorable online video moments in the comments.

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Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition will come as little surprise  to anyone that’s followed the company’s downward trajectory after launching in 2007 with more than $45 million in funding from heavy hitters such as Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Viacom, CBS and Chinese tycoon Li Ka-shing.

The company was rumored to be up for sale back in the spring, with Time Warner Cable topping the list of potential acquirers. From an operational standpoint, Joost has been badly hobbled since June, when it announced that it had laid off most of its staff and was trying to reshape itself as a white-label video management platform.

In its press release, Adconion said that it intends to continue pursuing the video management business, and that the addition of the Joost assets will further “solidify its position in the online video and content syndication market.” Adconion’s business is all about mass distribution of ads and branded entertainment, so having a video management platform like Joost makes sense. The company also said it would continue to operate Joost.com, both as a place to serve its own ads, and as a showcase for branded entertainment content that it produces.

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Joltid is a P2P technology provider incorporated in British Virgin Islands. It is owned by Joost and Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, and its tumultuous history makes the current fight with Volpi, Skype and eBay look like nothing special. Licensing conflicts that lead to the potential shutdown of a market leader? Been there, done that.

The roots of this conflict were planted all the way back in 2001, when file sharing was all the rage and Napster was being sued by the music industry. That was when Friis and Zennström came up with the idea of Kazaa, a file-sharing network based on a distributed database that would operate without central servers. The duo decided early on to apply this distributed architecture to the structure of their business as well.

Kazaa’s code was developed under contract by a startup in Estonia, with all of the work being coordinated from the Netherlands. Kazaa became Zennström and Friis’ flagship peer-to-peer product, but the idea was always to license the underlying P2P technology through a separate corporate entity called FastTrack BV. FastTrack’s code became part of a number of file-sharing clients such as Grokster, Morpheus and iMesh.

Morpheus proved to be especially successful and eventually managed to get more users than Kazaa itself. Then, out of the blue, the Morpheus client stopped working in early 2002. It quickly became clear that FastTrack had shut down the client by denying it access to its P2P network. Morpheus alleged at the time that this was a ploy to steal its user base and once again make Kazaa the most popular file-sharing client. Friis and Zennström had a different take and argued that Morpheus had failed to pay its licensing dues.

Morpheus quickly switched to an open, licensing-free technology to keep its service running, but had trouble providing a stable version of its client for some time and, in turn, lost countless users to Kazaa. The company filed a number of lawsuits against Friis, Zennström and related companies, but failed to convince the courts and eventually shut down due to overwhelming legal fees.

The Kazaa founders, on the other hand, were forced to sell their P2P client in light of mounting legal pressure, but held onto their P2P technology, which they continued to license through Joltid. Kazaa’s P2P core not only continued to power file-sharing networks, but also became the basis of Skype and eventually Joost, and Joltid in turn became a little-known but influential P2P powerhouse.

Fast-forward a few years: Kazaa and all of the file-sharing clients that used its technology have shut down. Joost abandoned its P2P roots under the leadership of Volpi. Skype is getting sold. eBay turned down an offer by Friis and Zennström, and the duo, seeing its influence wane, once again mounted a fight over licensing issues. Funny how history repeats itself, isn’t it?

Of course, the struggle and eventual demise of Morpheus isn’t exactly a good omen for Skype. But how does the lawsuit against Volpi fit into the picture? Joost and Joltid allege that Volpi gained insights into the inner workings of Joltid’s P2P technology through the process of bringing the video service to the web, and that this knowledge would help to develop a Skype version that doesn’t rely on P2P.

That’s a pretty dubious claim. Joost replaced P2P video delivery with Flash-based streaming. Skype, on the other hand, would have to switch to SIP and deal with issues like NAT traversal that just don’t matter if you operate a centralized streaming service. It’s like two very different vehicles that once shared the same road. Looking under the hood of one of them won’t help you to drive the other one.

However, if the Morpheus spat has taught us anything, it’s that this won’t end before at least one of the cars has been scrapped.

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The gist of the lawsuit is that Volpi learned how to modify Joltid’s proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone. With this knowledge, he was able to pitch a version of Skype that buyers could take over from eBay while side-stepping ongoing litigation.

eBay (and logically any buyer of Skype like the group Volpi and Index are currently leading) is embroiled in litigation over using Joltid’s technology, which runs the peer-to-peer software in Skype and the old version of Joost. But eBay and Skype only have an executable version of Joltid’s code to run Skype as an application, while Joost got access to the source code in order to modify it. (Friis and Zennstrom sold Skype to eBay in 2005, and are currently suing eBay as well.) If Volpi could reverse-engineer Skype in the same way today, it would potentially be able to operate without relying on Joltid. The lawsuit alleges the value of this confidential information is in the “billions of dollars.”

The lawsuit claims that if the above weren’t true, there’s no way Volpi and Index could have bought Skype.

“Volpi and Index lacked the credibility and financial heft to lead a private equity investment consortium to acquire Skype unless and until they advertised their knowledge of the Confidential Information.”

“Without the GI Software, Skype simply cannot function,” says the suit. The suit quotes Volpi in the Sunday Times, “[L]itigation is one of Skype’s liabilities…We are confident we can find a way [a]round it.”

The lawsuit alleges that Volpi has not returned his Joost computer, that he tried to make a copy of the confidential information, and that he tried to hire away Joost engineers with knowledge of the code. He apparently started work on the bid to buy Skype with Index in May, before stepping down in July (and being forced out last week). The lawsuit also indicates that Friis and Zennstrom may have been trying to do this themselves — Volpi had been privy to proposed plans to acquire Skype from eBay and combine Joost with Skype.

It’s possible this could just be a personal vendetta against Volpi. Here’s the airing of grievances:

“In a very short time, Volpi burned through a substantial amount of the working capital available to Joost at the time he became CEO. Moreover, he had removed from Joost a significant portion of Joost’s innovating and market-driving technology, leaving Joost to rely on third-party technology products. Volpi’s overall business strategy failed. Moreover, it was a failure that was extremely expensive, with Joost expending tens of millions of dollars of investors’ capital.”

But to Volpi’s credit, the original software version of Joost was extremely buggy. Though he may not have gained any market share with it nor been able to take advantage of the special P2P code, at least the modified Flash version of Joost worked! Basically Friis and Zennstrom are saying, you’re damned if you use our code, and you’re damned if you try to figure out a way not to.

The lawsuit is below (thanks to TechCrunch for posting an embeddable version):

Joost –

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Viacom Aggressively Takes Down Kanye Clips; network playing whack-a-mole with controversial MTV Video Awards appearance to make sure you only see the clip on TV or at MTV.com. (Media Decoder)

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AT&T Officially Launches Hulu-Like Venture; the telco’s premium content venture gets a lot of its content from Hulu. (The Hollywood Reporter) Liz broke the news of AT&T’s entertainment portal last week.

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Volpi Still on Ooyala’s Board; the now-former Chairman of Joost no longer has the conflict of serving on both white label video providers’ boards. (Contentinople)

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Volpi’s role at Index gets a little more interesting as his firm is one of the investors acquiring Skype from eBay and both Joost and Skype were founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom (who are in a legal tussle with eBay). For background on the Skype situation, you can learn more here and here.

We have followed Joost’s tortured history from rising star to the hollowed husk of its former self. This summer, realizing the premium content game was lost to rivals like Hulu, Joost switched strategies to become a white-label video provider (because what the online video world needs is another one of those). And just last week, the company’s CTO, Jason Gaedtke, left the startup to join Time Warner Cable.

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Joost announced last week that it was changing focus from offering premium content in order to become (yet another) white-label video provider. As part of that strategic shift, Volpi stepped down as CEO but remains chairman of the company. Volpi has a long history with Index as he invested $10 million in the firm’s first fund while he was an exec at Cisco. According to the press announcement, Volpi will be “based in the London office as part of the venture team where he will lead early stage investments in the Internet, telecom/networking and media sectors and contribute to the firm’s later stage growth fund.”

Kara Swisher at All Things D has an interview with Volpi about the latest move, where he offers up a few more details about Joost. On the company’s failure to be a premium content player, he said, “At the end of the day, the consumer offering we had was not working, a lot because we did not have enough access to content we needed to build traffic.” Volpi justified Joost’s move into the highly competitive world of white-label video by saying, “It is better to be competing in a sector that has profitable rivals than one that does not.” He said Joost had discussions with possible acquirers, but those didn’t pan out because of price issues. “Not everyone wanted to pay a lot to own Joost, but a lot of people wanted to rent it,” he said.

Hopefully, Volpi will be able to take the failure of Joost in stride and pass on his experience of what not to do as a startup to the companies Index invests in.

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What makes this move seem all the more doomed is that Joost is already enlisting another white-label video provider, Ooyala, to manage its ingesting, transcoding and metadata management. How exactly will Joost pitch itself as a competitor to Ooyala (where Volpi is also on the board) when it uses Ooyala itself?

Joost said it will maintain a core team in New York and London to work on the new white-label biz, as well as operating Joost.com. The company will “wind down” operations in its Leiden development center. According to a statement attributed to Volpi, Joost “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends,” which seems like it could not mean anything other than layoffs, but Joost wouldn’t elaborate further or provide specific numbers.

In April, it was rumored that Joost was looking to sell itself and had even talked with Time Warner Cable.

We used to joke here at NTV that becoming a white-label video provider was what a business did when all other strategies failed. And it looks like Joost is no exception. After starting off as a P2P-based app, the company found that requiring a download hampered its ability to gain traction. It then moved to a plug-in and eventually moved completely to a Flash based method for watching web TV.

But as Joost struggled to find its way, the door was open for rivals like Hulu to swoop in and establish themselves as premium content portals. A quick look at Compete.com shows how Hulu has soared while Joost pretty much flatlined:

But a bigger problem is that unlike Hulu, where its owners/content partners like NBC and FOX seem to take an active role in the success of the site, Joost’s media company investors Viacom and CBS treated the service like a red-headed stepchild. While Hulu has raked in brand-name content, Joost has tried to make do with its limited catalog. Earlier this month, the company signed 12 content partners — but none of them were big name TV or movie companies.

Joost was once heralded as the future of television. Times have changed.

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This isn’t the first time Joost is toying with widgets. The company’s P2P-based video application also featured a widget API, but few wanted to develop for a player that had no user base. However, Joost has clearly been thinking about how to make widgets work in the past few years, and some of these ideas could lead to interesting results.

The Twitter widget demonstrated on the Joost blog seems like a nice gimmick, but not really groundbreaking. So why does Joost Chief Creative Officer Henrik Werdelin herald this as the birth of “open-source TV?” Werdelin writes on his blog that the upcoming API will allow users to “create any cool interactive active [sic] TV application on top of any of the shows on Joost.”

Part of that excitement is clearly rooted in the fact that the folks at Joost have spent a lot of time thinking about how to use metadata as part of the Joost viewing experience. Company developers already hinted at the possibility of “timestamped tagging, commenting, annotation” all the way back in the spring of 2007.

Fast-forward two years. The app is gone; Joost is all web-based and Flash-only. However, Joost’s new widget API will give developers access to things like the title and description of the video as well as the current time in the video. That means a widget will be able to know what scene a user is watching, and developers could add widgets that make it possible to add content-specific comments and share them with other viewers.

Granted, some of these things have already been done. Viddler, for example, allows users to add time-specific tags to its videos, and sites like Tubepopper make it possible to add text to third-party videos. Joost’s API, however, will allow a much more direct interaction with the actual video, to the point where widgets will be able to stop and restart a clip. One could easily think of a widget that makes it possible to add an episode guide to a TV show like Lost, pausing at key scenes and explaining references to past episodes with content added by the community.

Of course, Joost doesn’t have Lost, or barely any other popular TV show for that matter. Judging from the site’s activity stream, the most popular clips on Joost seem to be music videos and anime episodes. We’ll have to wait and see whether that inspires developers to come up with any exciting, new widgets this time around.

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The Joost news comes just a day after research from In-Stat predicted that game consoles would remain the dominant delivery mechanism for web video on television sets through 2013. The migration of newteevee to oldteevee is one we’ve been keeping tabs on here, and it looks like Joost has run into the same hurdle Boxee and Hulu.

Studios and networks are all for putting their content online, but they don’t want it to be an end-run around traditional TV operators, giving people a reason to cut their cable cords. This attitude resulted in the official removal of Hulu from Boxee, and when Hulu recently released its desktop app, it expressly forbid running it on anything other than a PC.

We don’t have a PS3, so if any NewTeeVee readers out there do, fire up Joost and tell us how well it works.

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