According to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, Viacom is expected to announce a licensing deal with Joost, a new Internet service that specializes in commercial video content. You can get some background information from my previous posts.
The collapse of talks between Viacom and YouTube/Google just few weeks ago had resulted in 100,000 video clips been removed from the popular video site. What are the tricks that Joost has put in place to win the trust from Viacom? The answer is simple - Joost is designed for commercial video content from day one.
Joost makes it possible to distribute streams of video to its users using P2P technology. There is no central server involved in the process. Each user plays a role in distributing real time video streams just like BitTorrent.
There is no Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection applied on the content. Each user only gets a fragment of the content and it is not saved on the disk to make up the whole video watchable offline.
Update: In an interview with the IDG News Service, Bill Hilf, general manager for platform strategy at Microsoft, spoke about both Sun and Novell deals and about how the company regards open-source software.
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer signified the collaboration agreements between Microsoft and Novell as a clever deal to bridge Microsoft community and open source community. He said “we don’t license our intellectual property to Linux because of the way the Linux licensing, GPL framework works, that’s not really a possibility”.
As in the case of national politics, there is always going to be about 20% hard supporter for Microsoft and Linux respectively. There are 5% or so not buying in any of them and the rest or 55% a bit “opportunistic” because they believe the cost is the same no matter which one they choose - the difference is only in the cost component.
These 55% demand interoperability between Microsoft products and the open source products. However, Microsoft wants to be paid so badly for its intellectual property (IP) which takes years and millions of dollars to build that it avoids the issue for years.