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Joost strikes TV deals with Sony, Time Warner, NHL and Hasbro By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
May 1, 2007
The founders of Joost are trying to map television's future. But they're starting with a bunch of reruns. Joost, the Internet TV outfit started by the team behind the Kazaa file-sharing program and Skype Internet phone service, said Tuesday that it had struck deals for shows and shorter clips from Time Warner Inc., Sony Corp., the National Hockey League and Hasbro Inc. That deal lets Joost users watch shows such as "Charlie's Angels" and "Larry King Live" on their computer screens, starting Thursday. The service, pronounced "juiced," offers a smorgasbord of more than 150 channels featuring full-length shows including "Rocky and Bullwinkle," "Beavis & Butt-Head" and the "CSI" series. Joost launched in January as an invitation-only website available to a handful of viewers. On Tuesday, the site threw open its doors, letting current subscribers invite as many people as they want to become members. Viewers can watch for free as long as they're willing to sit through some ads. Last week, the Luxembourg-based company announced deals with more than 30 advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp. and Nike Inc. "We're expanding our content offerings, we're adding advertisers and we're opening the floodgates to people to come watch," said Joost Chief Executive Fredrik de Wahl. "So everything is coming together." The site was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the Scandinavian software programmers who developed Skype, which they sold two years ago to EBay Inc. for $2.5 billion, plus as much as $1.4 billion more if they reach certain incentives. They also created Kazaa, which ran afoul of the music and movie industries for enabling users to share pirated songs and shows. With Joost, the two are using the same peer-to-peer technology to distribute shows more efficiently over the Internet. This time, however, they have copyright holders on their side, including CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. With Tuesday's deal, Joost adds shows such as "Robot Chicken" from Time Warner's Adult Swim cable TV network, NHL game highlights, interviews with Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and episodes of Hasbro's "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" cartoons. 
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