14 DAY TRIAL // Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, announced a new partnership with Joost to distribute video files through a secure peer to peer application. Joost is quite an anonymous product because it wasn't so well promoted but it is currently available on Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX while a Linux edition is in developing stages. Although the two companies refused to provide more information about the agreement, it is expected that Viacom will provide video content to be distributed on the Joost application using secure anti-piracy functions.
Joost is co-owned by Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis, the founder of the well known VoIP program Skype that helps you communicate on the Internet using one of the most well-developed technologies. As you might know, Viacom is regarded as a Google enemy because the company demanded YouTube to remove almost 100.000 clips from the page as the two firms didn't agree to share the revenue obtained after the upload of the video content.
"There can be no doubt that this is a humbling piece of news to the Googlers who have managed to tick off most of the traditional media businesses with their purported hard-ball negotiations," says Brumfield. "Google, it is said, lobbed a veiled threat to Viacom (and other TV content providers) that it would not use its content protection system for filtering copyrighted video on YouTube works unless it had a deal in hand with the content provider," ITNews reported.
Many users might think that Viacom is now fighting against Google's YouTube, trying to challenge the video service after they removed an important amount of content from their database. Although YouTube may look a little vulnerable, you should never underestimate the power of the search giant and remember that Google is one of the most popular and powerful companies on the Internet. So, this strategy might be a little dangerous but both of them must follow Google's motto: "Don't be evil..."