Technically Speaking

Michelangelo Volpi who spent time at Cisco, is going to be announced as the new CEO of Joost. While Joost is really in a testing phase currently, they have established themselves as a great service. They also went the legal route by establishing some high end contracts with Viacom and Time Warner.

Currently it appears that the new CEO will be relocating to London to run the operations of Joost. What excites Mike as he likes to be called?

“Traditional television as we know it is gradually going to go away,” Mr. Volpi said in his first interview as Joost’s chief executive. “We hope to capture the hearts and minds of users who have turned away from TV as a form of entertainment.”

Mr. Volpi said that Joost would ultimately be available in many places. “Joost is a piece of software and it can reside on a variety of platforms,” he said. “It could be on a television set-top box. Or potentially it could be imbedded in a TV set with an Ethernet connection, or on a mobile phone, or in some alternative device that might come out in the future. The flexibility is really high.”

I hear you loud and clear Mike! Television is dying off slowly, and Joost appears to have a handle on how to bridge the gap between the computer generation and the MTV generation. The best of both worlds if you will. Why did the owners/founders of Joost choose Mr. Volpi?

Mr. Volpi was born in Milan and grew up in Japan. As head of Cisco’s mergers and acquisitions team for seven years, he was responsible for the company’s first 70 acquisitions. Before he left Cisco this year, he was frequently mentioned as a possible successor to the chief executive, John Chambers.

His border-crossing résumé is appropriate for Joost, a service that aspires to weave together programs from around the globe. Joost carries shows from incongruous sources like the Bollywood network Saavn; the Brazilian Music Channel; Fútbol de Nicaragua, and the National Hockey League, and it lets users personalize their channel listings.

Where does this take all of the Joost users? It appears that there won’t be any opening of all the doors until next year.

“Eventually our hope is that other prime-time providers like NBC, Fox and Disney will come on board, because we are an attractive place given the numbers of users we have,” Mr. Volpi said. “Content owners don’t care where content is distributed so long as it reaches a larger number of users who can be monetized.”

Mr. Volpi said he expected Joost to remain in test mode for the rest of this year, growing to around a million viewers, and then to open its doors more broadly next year.

Why join Joost? I mean as in, why not take the CEO job at Cisco which many had speculated he was groomed to take soon.

Mr. Volpi said he had other opportunities after leaving Cisco, but was drawn to the wide-open frontier of Internet television. “Television is a massive market, and when you put it together with the Internet, and to be on the ground floor of that, there weren’t many other opportunities to do something this big.”

Technically Speaking, my only wish for Joost and all applications that require a broadband connection is that it works great over wireless connections. Joost for me at least still doesn’t fire to well over a wireless connection.