Watch Out YouTube, Global TV JOOST Got Better!

In the few months since Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, both companies have tried to come up with a formula to turn the hugely popular online video site into a moneymaking venture.

Friday, YouTube announced a deal with the BBC, creating a channel for the British network's most popular shows. On Monday, it announced a similar deal with the National Basketball Association.

But at least one partner has expressed unhappiness with its YouTube deal. Last month, NBC, which promoted its fall lineup on the site, demanded that YouTube take down some unauthorized videos. And now more media companies are flirting with smaller YouTube competitors, such as Revver and iFilm. Last month Joost, signed a content deal with Viacom, which owns MTV and Comedy Central.

Without a deal with Viacom, YouTube is left without some of its most popular clips from Comedy Central's "South Park" and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." Viacom, which walked away from a YouTube deal last month, claims that traffic to its Web sites such as Comedycentral.com and MTV.com has increased since it put more video there, allowing visitors to embed clips on their own blogs or other Web sites.

The Joost team has a few things going for it, good lineage when it comes to getting traction with a new product (Kazaa, Skype); founders (Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom) with deep pockets and the ability to attract more; and the byproduct of those two—plenty of publicity/hype. (Joost is feeding the buzz with a time-proven gimmick: make the beta hard to get into and urge people to ask those already in the beta for a token to get access.) Their contention: they shouldn’t be grouped with the others because Joost is real TV for the web. If the player is half as good as Joost’s ability to get juice, they really could be on to something.

For now, it’s by invitation only, but by this summer it will be open to the public. You’ll download the free Joost software, then use it to watch channels ranging from Lime, a lifestyle station, to National Geographic. And potentially thousands more, from anywhere, in real time — and without the stuttervision that dogs streaming video today. It’s the creation of a team of 60 top engineers — veterans of Apple, Flickr and Firefox.

Joost says it’s about to announce a pact with JumpTV to carry some programming it has rights to from 270 stations in 70 countries; that deal will launch with prerecorded Spanish and Arabic programming. The goal eventually is to stream some of the stations live.