Babelgum a betta Beta I wonder - and hey Joost, where's our invite then?

First thing this morning(1) I see another "bog off to the back of the beta queue" email from TVP(2) / Joost (3), and the good news that it has a competitor in Babelgum ( good review of this on GigaOm). All my PR, VC, Analyst and Media friends have Joost invites - we just do this stuff for a living, so what would we know - or is that why we haven't seen an invite?

(Joost's DRM is unmentioned by nearly all of the media reviews for example - only the Register's review of Joost makes an aside to its use of its own DRM - now that could be very important in its take-up vs. clear-content plays, or in a DRM-draconia bake-off)

The thing is, putting Web TV on a Social Net based broadband service is fairly standard stuff now. Yes, you can tweak the user interface look and feel - (a good, fast user interface is critical, the trials we did at BT 10 years ago showed that) - but so can everyone else, and fairly quickly. And everyone is using targeted advertising as the way to make money - so much so that I wonder whether its time to go contrarian and look at ploughing the subscription furrow, as the Web-TV-TiVo is sure to emerge. But, at the end of the day its all about content. And that means things like DRM approaches start to become important, owning an end-to-end value chain like iTunes will be far harder in the Web TV world.

In an earlier post I referred to Porn driving adoption in previous new Media services...I wonder if Web TV will go that way...in which case I fancy an Italian outfit's chances, or maybe the dark horse here is actually a video Eroshare....(4)

As an aside to the content context, I don't know which is more intriguing in Web TV stuff right now - the object lessons in alpha PR beta-hyping or the technologies themselves.....can't be Edelman doing Joost's PR I assume ?

There are of course the inevitable doomsayers who believe that p2pTV won't work (contention, limited bandwidth, ISP limits to capacity etc) - there is a sanguine article by mega-uber blogger James Enck over here on this issue.

Haven't had the same beta issues with TIOTI et al by the way....oh, and could you also give an invite to these guys while you're at it.

Postscript - saw this article on Wired about Joost, most detail I've seen to date.

1. Been away for 2 days you see.....and OK, not quite first thing
2. The Venice Project
3. Joost is a Dutch / South African good ole boy's name...Joost van der Westhuizen, the Springbok rugby player for example. Seems kinda like calling your service Mike, or Bobby - or Robrt if its Web 2.0....(or Randy, if its a Porn TV service....). Maybe the BBC online WebTV service should change its name to Auntie after all?
4. The medium is the massage after all