Why did Joost fail?

Working with Joost has been great for me. When I came in I had few marketable skills, little experience, and, not much wisdom about how people work. Now that Joost is largely over, and I am back on the market, looking for a new job, it is time to think about what I’ve learned and what I can take away into the future.

It has been a honour and privilege to work with so many incredibly smart and dedicated people. I haven’t seen anything that comes close at any previous employer that I worked with, and I am doing everything I can to find a job in the same type of environment. It is really strange to realize that Joost as a company has failed, despite all the talent and dedication it was riding on. Time to take a break and do a sub-item about one of the key questions about Joost:

At first, it seemed like there was no way that Joost could ever fail; they had an incredible amount of cash, and were backed by some of the biggest players in media (CBS and Viacom). Yet they did, and all I have left now is a closet full of t-shirts. ;-) I have by no means the wisdom to answer all questions, and even if I had, it would be imprudent or unlawful to tell everything, but here is a list of items that most definitely went wrong:

• Money: Most companies have too little of it. Joost had too much of it. Because they had so much money to float on, people spent too much time working on frameworks, writing real fancy, code, that could theoretically scale up to 100’s of millions of users, instead of creating a much simpler product that would actually appeal to those millions of users. Even worse, Joost squandered millions on secondary things like: Expensive offices, travel, all company parties/meetings etc.
• Management/strategy: Generally it is unwise to talk too much about management, but now the founders have started to sue the CEO, I guess I can point out one or two things that management has done wrong.
  • Focus on USA: While the states were the biggest single market, it is most definitely not the most internet savvy, with relatively slow internet connections, especially in the heartland. Even now, the European market is wide open, and as far as I understand there is still plenty of opportunity in Asia too.
  • Engineering focus: Joost thought they were a technology company, while the fact of the matter was that they were, and should have behaved like a media company. When the client didn’t gain much traction after launch, very quickly it was decided that the only solution was to get a website. One of the core issues, the lack of anything appealing to watch to make the client worth the trouble of launching, was never addressed. Moving to a website/flash wasn’t necessarily a bad move on itself, but leaving the client to flounder for a full year really hurt Joost’s credibility, both with users and content owners.
  • Content: I already briefly mentioned it in the previous paragraph: Joost didn’t have anything worth watching, which was the main reason almost all users lost attention very quickly. Joost would have been better of if the spent all that too much money that I mentioned first on buying content and gaining loyalty from users, content owners and advertises in an early phase. (Of course there were mayor scalability problems in the platform that would have made this almost impossible).
• I’ll leave it at this. If you wish to find out how Mike Volpi has failed to perform his duties as CEO (and thus hammered the final nail into the coffin) I recommend that you read the court documents, while the declaration from Owen O’Donnell tells how Volpi failed to sell the company when the end was nigh.

So, now we have covered this, back to my regular programming.

What was in it for me?

While Joost hasn’t given me much in the way of money, I do think I have gained a lot from the experience. I worked with a lot of very nice, very cool and incredibly smart people, and I hope many of them think well of me. This network should be able to help me secure future opportunities.

While at Joost I gained an incredible amount of skill and knowledge. While just I knew my way around computers before I joined Joost, now I have gained a lot of very rare skills; I know a lot about video, and how things like content workflow work. Of course this is very specialized knowledge, but while learning this, I learned a lot more too: project management, politics (like it or not, you need to be able to do this if you want to get things done in a bigger organization), deal with crises, delegate, communicate, etcetera, etcetera.

I do notice that it stings a bit that (especially established) employers seem to insist on certifications, while fact of the matter is that (especially in this field) most certifications are useless. This is a bit of a tough hurdle to overcome, but I’m confident I will manage to do so very soon. I will probably be best off gaining more experience in the start-up scene, until I reach the amount of experience where certifications don’t matter anymore.

Working at a start-up is taking a leap, and trying to create a dream. It has been thrilling, addictive, and tons of hard work, and if I could turn back time, I would do it all over again.

De grote crimineel

(Apologies for a post in Dutch, but I want to comment on this affair and this is a) only interesting for Dutch people and b) my vocabulary for financial terms is rather limited)

Ik ben zeker geen fan van de DSB bank. Over de afgelopen jaren (zoniet decennia) heb ik me bont en blauw geërgerd aan alle reclames voor Frisia en alle andere Dirk Scheringa leenboeren en hoe ze mensen aanzetten tot onverantwoorde leningen, zelfs voor zaken als een nieuw bankstel of een nieuw bloesje. Dit is niet netjes, en ik ben er van overtuigd dat DSB en voorgangers over de afgelopen dertig jaar misbruik heeft gemaakt van mensen die niet beter wisten.

Als ik 1 Vandaag zag, dan wisten de mensen die een DSB hypotheek namen heus wel dat ze een suboptimale hypotheek namen, maar waar de Rabobank 3 weken nodig had om een lening rond te maken, regelde DSB dat in een dag, met minder vragen. Dit is zeker ook de klanten klanten aan te rekenen. Dit was ook hun keuze, en je bent het aan jezelf verplicht om pas een document te ondertekenen als je hem volledig gelezen en begrepen hebt.

Een stichting klinkt heel nobel en non-profit. Maar ze betalen natuurlijk wel salaris aan een advocaat, en één van die advocaten is de heer Pieter Lakeman. Deze publiteitsgeile geldwolf heeft aan de belazerde mensen van DSB een makkelijk publiek. Ze zijn al een keer genept, en met de illusie dat hij ze hun geld zal kunnen teruggeven, troggelt hij nog meer geld uit hun zakken. Deze meneer Lakeman kwam op het belachelijke idee om spaarders op te roepen om hun geld terug te trekken, omdat met een curator redelijker zou zijn dan een bank. Dat idee is gewoon volslagen belachelijk. Er zijn gewoon wetten en regels met betrekking tot faillisementen, en bij een faillisement is er gewoon netjes een volgorde waarin schuldeisers moeten worden betaald. Als eerste moet de belastingdienst worden betaald. Dan uitstaande spaarders. Dan komen een keer leveranciers en medewerkers, en ergens helemaal onderaan de lijst komen dan een keer mensen als de heer Lakeman en zijn achterban, en ik gok dan ook dat hij nu helemaal niets krijgt.

De overeenkomst

Vorige week bereikte de DSB bank een overeenkomst met Stichting Steunfonds Probleemhypotheken. Dit hield in dat DSB op korte termijn de maandlasten van gedupeerden omlaag zou brengen tot een normaal niveau, en dat overbodige koopsompolissen gesloten, en deels zelfs terugbetaald zouden worden. Deze overeenkomst werd uiteindelijk niet ondertekend door DSB, volgens DSB onder druk van de DNB, die bang was voor een precedentwerking. Waarom? Zou je denken; DSB is toch de bank van de tokkiehypotheken, anderen doen daar toch niet aan? Nou, dat had je gedacht. DSB stopte in april met tophypotheken die werden verhoogd met een koopsompolis. Ze leverden niet zo veel op, vanwege het inherente risico, en ze zijn slecht voor je reputatie (zoals je nu hebt gezien). Andere banken hebben nog niet zoveel last van overbodige zaken als realiteitszin, dus zelfs een ‘nette’ bank als de Rabobank deed aan koppelverkoop met koopsompolissen.

De ondergang

Tijdens het afgelopen weekend kreeg de DNB haast. DSB moest dood, koste wat het kost. Toen een rechtszaak zondagnacht niet hun doel bereikte, zorgde gelekt nieuws over de ondergang van DSB richting de Volkskrant (die om 11 uur gezakt was, dus voordat er een uitspraak was) er voor dat de realiteit de fictie inhaalde, en DSB werd onder curatele gesteld. Het gedrag van de DNB en financiën is verdacht. Voor een deel lijkt het persoonlijke rancune te zijn tegen die vrijbuiter uit Wognum, maar het grootste risico komt uit die overeenkomst die DSB dreigde te sluiten met gedupeerde hypotheeknemers. Ik weet niet wat er nu gaat gebeuren met DSB, maar ik weet zeker dat de geest van de koopsompolis uit de fles is, en dat alle andere banken alsnog met de billen bloot moeten.

I’m going to post a lame-ass excuse for now. I have noticed that writing wise I have gone out of practice, so I’m brushing my writing skills before returning into the blogosphere.

Upcoming topics should be: The demise of Joost, my vacations, and quite possibly about job searching life.

On quality

In the past two years that I’ve been working in transcoding at Joost, I have learnt a lot about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to putting video on the internet, and I have also seen that in many cases, the best thing to do is go back to the source. This is too much to fit into one guide, so today I will just introduce you to some of the characteristics of great looking video, and in future installments I will explain how to get individual things right using free (and possiby open source tools).

Most websites will compress video a lot, and encode video to a smaller frame size. Nevertheless it’s a bad idea to send low quality files to aggregrators; each encode will cause more quality loss, and if an encoder tries to encode a low-quality blocky video, the encoder will spend a lot of bits encoding the artifacts in the file you delivered instead of the actual desired picture. So just send the high quality, full size (be it 480p, 720p, or 1080p) and leave the dealing with scaling to the aggregators. They have their systems set up to do that anyhow.

File formats

I recommend two file formats, when preparing video for delivery. Either good old MPEG-2, the workhorse of the video industry, or mp4, with H.264 video and AAC audio. You almost cannot go wrong if you use the following bitrates for these formats:

• MPEG-2, SD: 8 Mbps
• H.264, 480p: 3 Mbps
• H.264, 720p: 8 Mbps
• H.264, 1080p: 20 Mbps

I must admit that I have relatively little knowledge of Windows Media, but while it has been common for streaming video for a while, it has lost ground to H.264 video these days, and it is not a native format for most video editors, so I can’t recommend it. Generally I recommend staying away from Quicktime if at all possible. Although modern Quicktime files generally will work just fine because it contains more or less the same things as a mp4 with H.264 and AAC, I have seen at least one occurence where there were cards (think a couple of slides) at the beginning of the video which were not part of the video track, causing ffmpeg based players and encoders (think Youtube and VLC) to not display things as expected.

Fill the frame

In online video you only have a limited amount of pixels, it’s a shame to waste about of a third of the pixels available to encode just black because your content is letterboxed, pillarboxed, or worst of all: windowboxed. Letterboxed content looks like this:

Letterboxed video, for in-depth explanation on letterboxing, see the wikipedia entry

Make sure there are no interlacing artifacts

One of the biggest killers for online video are interlacing artifacts. Interlacing artifacts are horizontal stripes, that can mostly be seen during fast horizontal movements, when the camera gets panned, or at very quick transitions. They are caused by the fact that back in the day televisions did not build up the picture progressively, but first rendered the odd lines, and then the even. Handbrake’s guide on interlacing is pretty good, and it is also a great tool to remove it.

Example of video with interlacing artifacts

In almost all cases I have seen of interlacing artifacts, these have been caused by issues in the video that has been uploaded. The two ways you can get interlacing artifacts in your video are:

• Encoding a video that was interlaced to progressive without running a deinterlace filter.
• Resizing a interlaced video without deinterlacing it first.

As far as I can tell there is no real decent way to remove interlacing artifacts once the damage is done, so if you ever have issues with this, generally the only way to go is to move back to the step when your video was still interlaced, and fix things at that stage.

Source

I LOVE freakonomics; they approach the sci^H^H^Hart of economics with a sense of humor, delight and curiosity, and they attract a readership that has the same qualities. Today they are asking their readers what they think the reason is that there are seemingly more men than women that write books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular.”

Some commenters decided to make it into a joke, but it is the reply that made me laugh.

Hmmz, looks like I’m becoming a sucker for images that are texts in typewriter style on blank paper:

I follow Seth Godin’s blog, because he tends to have interesting things to say about marketing. This time I think he’s really really right; organizations that are trying to maintain a status quo through regulation are doing their members a disservice; the world is changing, and the pace of change in the world is ever increasing, so you’re better off if your trade association helps you adapt to the changing world and remain relevant 5 years from now, than if it fights a losing battle against change and innovation.

Like most geeks, I love TED talks, and think it’s great that they’re put on the internet for free for anyone to watch. I really liked this one, although I have a hard time believing that all the answers are as simple and clear as the speaker makes them out to be.

Deep down inside I remain an optimist. That is why I loved this gem I encountered on ffffound: