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Joost, an IPTV based video service, is making news on a regular basis now. The company has now announced that it has raised $45 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital (based in Silicon Valley), Index Ventures (based in London and also investors in Skype), Li Ka-shing (a Hong Kong based business tycoon), Viacom and CBS. All the investers have taken a small minority stake in the company.

The interesting fact about the investment round is that Media corps i.e Viacom and CBS have increased their interests in Joost and have become investors instead of just being content partners. Sequoia and Index on the other hand are industry reknowned and war hardened VCs. Another key fact to note is that with Sequoia in Silicon Valley, Index Ventures in London and Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong, Joost has expanded its reach to 3 continents including the strategic and difficult to enter Chinese market. So all in all the investment round has brought a lot more than just a huge pile of cash into this startup.

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BBC has published a very interesting survey conducted by Motorola, which interviewed 2,500 people across Europe. Some important findings of the survey are:

• 45% of European broadband users were watching some television shows online, with the French being the most enthusiastic in consuming their favorite programmes via the web.
• 45% of respondents expect to be able to make video calls via their television by 2012.
• 35% wanted to be able to pause, rewind or fast forward live broadcasts.

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Update: For the Love of God Please write your email address in the comment itself.

Joost, a new adventure by the founders of Kazaa and Skype, has officially launched a couple of days back. Although they have not opened up the signup process for the general public, but they have taken the lid off the number of invitations that a person already using Joost could send out. Thanks to my friend Bruce Ryan (do add him as a friend on twitter, he is Very Nice), I was able to get an invitation and there by test the IPTV service last night. I must admit it that Joost being a hybrid of TV and social networking is really sticky. Although I did not find enough content to get me bogged down for hours and hours, but I guess that will improve with time.

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Om Malik is reporting that Joost will be officially launching today, although the service is not opened to the general public as yet, but they have allowed their Beta testers to invite as many friends as they want. Previously Beta Testers typically had 5 invitations. For the rest of us, we would have to wait till the end of May to get our hands dirty with Joost.

Joost is the latest adventure of serial entrepreneurs Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström who have now successfully started and sold Kazaa and Skype, both of which were also desktop based applications like Joost. Joost is actually built on the same P2P core which Janus and Friis initially developed for Kazaa. Lets see how many successful ventures could they run on the same technology core.

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Joost, the new project of Skype founders-who now want to revolutionize the way we watch TV, has signed three month contracts with a group of 31 brand advertisers including Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Nike, General Motors, and Visa.

Joost will offer these advertisers traditional 30 second spot per block of programming, served on a mid-roll basis. U.S. advertisers include Electronic Arts, Kraft, Lionsgate, Microsoft, Nestle, and Purina Petcare where as IBM, LÓreal Paris and Nokia will be advertising in Europe. Coca Cola, HP and Intel will advertise globally.

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