14 DAY TRIAL // Joost, the free Internet TV currently in beta, received an impressive $45 million investment to become even more powerful and crush the rival YouTube. According to ITnews, Joost attracted no more than five famous names such as CBS, Global Expansion Index Ventures, Li Ka Shing Foundation, Sequoia Capital and one of the most famous YouTube rivals, Viacom. As far I can see, Viacom wants to get involved in almost any potential YouTube competitor, looking to make the Mountain View company a little bit more envious. If you didn't know, Viacom is the owner of MTV and Comedy Central and sued Google for copyright infringement, requiring $1 billion in damages.
"We've carefully selected these investors from a variety of interested parties, as they are best-in-class in their respective arenas and bring unique assets to Joost that will enable us to significantly accelerate growth and development of the company," said Janus Friis, Joost founder, according to the same source.
At this time, there are a lot of YouTube competitors that expressed their plans to crush the online video sharing service but, until now, none of them managed to steal an important segment of users. Some time ago, Sony debuted its eyeVio, a video sharing service that was especially released to compete with the search giant's product. In the past, several services also wanted to challenge YouTube but the Google solution faced the challenge with ease. Let me give you a simple example. GodTube is a YouTube-like product that wants to lure Christians to its church-related content. YouTube replied with quite a simple move, releasing a special channel hosted on the official page that targeted the same category of users with similar content.