Mozilla in Asia

The NY Times has an interesting article looking at a few next-generation “Internet TV” services including Joost, which us Mozillians know is based on XUL, XULRunner and Mozilla.

Joost has attracted considerable attention since Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the entrepreneurs behind Skype, an Internet telephony service now owned by eBay, and Kazaa, a peer-to-peer network that became the bane of the music industry, disclosed last year that they were working on an Internet video project. While Joost has announced programming deals with Viacom, National Geographic and other content providers, it had provided few details about its advertising, including the potential clients.

The list of big brands to be announced today may go a long way toward answering questions about the commercial viability of Joost, which Mr. Friis and Mr. Zennstrom initially called the Venice Project. The first advertisers also include the Purina division of Nestlé, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, the Opel and Vauxhall units of General Motors, Taco Bell, Lions Gate Entertainment and the United States Army, according to advertising agencies working with Joost.

What’s literally exciting for everyone involved is that no one knows how this will go. No one knows how tv-style advertising might work on the PC, (Joost is a full-screen application) but the ads that are currently shown in the beta seem ‘familiar’ to me- i.e. I know that I have to watch some ads to get the free ‘content.’

What’s also exciting to think about is how a XULRunner-based application might be the leading next-generation Internet-TV platform. It’s hard to imagine that but if that came to be it would be a tremendous event for Mozilla and XUL.

In addition to Joost, it’s important to remember that there are some other XULRunner-based applications which are worth trying: Songbird, Democracy Player, and others.

This Internet TV Program Is Brought to You by … - New York Times

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.