Techcrunch has a good article today on the threat represented by Adobe's new upcoming Flash 9 H.264 (a beta is here) video streaming capability. It is indeed true that, with the H.264 video codec, centralized web video streaming becomes much more economical, since the quality will about double with the current download bandwidth. Or downloads of the same quality video will be much faster.

Joost's advantage of having higher quality video will disappear. The economics of P2P will not work to their advantage any longer (was anyway only one advantage for Joost) and interactivity and customization are equally good on any video portal. In short, the over-ambitious plans of Joost to become a video and web TV portal and make money with customized ads will be history before it has even started to create any sizable revenues. We were always very skeptical on Joost, now it looks like the Skype founders may be about to have their first flop after having landed two slam-dunks with Kazaa and Skype. As a VP Marketing once said to me when I decided to leave a startup in Silicon Valley for another one, "See you in the next venture."