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Mar 12 2008 9:59AM EDT

Joost and the First Truly Live Net TV Mass-Market Broadcast

Joost is set to test live, mass-market broadcast video over the Web on Thursday. But the real test will come on March 20 when Joost begins showing live March Madness basketball games. Nothing like it has been done on the Web -- potentially millions of viewers watching a live stream at the same time using peer-to-peer technology. This is different than the VIP video passes for the games on CBS' site -- Joost will not limit the number of people who can watch. It's also different from AOL's streaming of the Live 8 concert, which was expensive direct-streaming technology. Joost's P2P is supposed to be far cheaper and more efficient.

I talked a few months ago with Joost CEO Mike Volpi about the move to live video.

As he said then: "Live sports will someday drive huge amounts of concurrent viewers to the site, which can cause massive congestion, so it gets expensive. With P2P, it's not so much a problem, but the issue is delay. We can do live now (in January) with a five-minute delay. That's OK but you probably don't want to watch the Super Bowl with a five-minute delay. We are compressing it with technology. We know we can get to 45 seconds." At March Madness time, Joost will find out just how small the delay can get.

By the way, this is also not the same as UStream or YouTube's plans to do live video. Both of those are targeted at niche live videos that would likely only be seen by a few thousand people at once. Joost's version is an attempt to serve millions at once.

I'll have more on Joost and the Internet TV space in a story about to come out in the April issue of Portfolio magazine.

UPDATE: A message from Joost: "We'll release a new version of Joost today. People should download this version to participate in the Joost LIVE Test."

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