Joost's office on the south end of Manhattan is in a geriatric 11-story building served by elevators so slow you suspect someone is pulling them up hand over hand. There's no company sign on the door, and inside, it's all urban hip, with exposed two-by-fours, open ductwork, and walls covered in silver metallic latticework that looks as if it were stolen off a futuristic chaise longue. I slip through subwaylike turnstiles at the front desk—yes, it does seem odd—and bend myself past a copier hidden by the kind of heavy red curtain you might see on a puppet-show stage. A public-relations woman then leads me into a squished conference room furnished with cheap plastic Ikea chairs. I know because I own the same chairs.

Joost has only about 30 people in Manhattan, plus 20 in London and about 60 in the Netherlands. Two years ago, when the public first heard about the company—at the time under its code name, the Venice Project—the startup was expected to use the internet to reinvent television, or render it obsolete. Joost had money, clout, and enough mystery to electrify the media. CBS joined an investment group—along with venture firm Sequoia Capital and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing—that pumped $45 million into the company. Joost was supposed to be really big by now. A YouTube. An iTunes. But it's not.

Into the Ikea-outfitted conference room walks the man who's trying to change that. Mike Volpi, 41, took the Joost C.E.O. job a year ago. Before that, he was the best-known executive at Cisco not named John Chambers. Volpi is an Italian who spent much of his childhood in Japan and most of his adult years in Silicon Valley. He is tall and angular, wears modish black-rimmed glasses, and maintains an appealing scruffiness—not that perfect Justin Timberlake stubble that seems to have its own greenskeeper, but more that of a guy who works on a loading dock. Despite the rough-hewn look, Volpi comes across as unusually mischievous for a C.E.O., especially when his infectious smile spreads across his face in the manner of a Wallace and Gromit Claymation character.

"When I came here, we didn't have a human-resources policy," he says, sounding more amused than alarmed. "We didn't know how many people worked for us. We had no real income statement or balance sheet. The first thing I had to do was put those things in place." But while he was doing that, something happened to Joost that no one expected back in the Venice Project days: It became an also-ran. "This market changed so much in a year," Volpi says. "It went from 'No one thought it was feasible' to 'Everyone is doing it.' "