Janus Friis on Joost: adult content coming soon!

Joost co-founder Janus Friis has outlined future possibilities for the web TV service including charging users, introducing adult content and never going down the "slippery slope" of splitting ad revenue with ISPs.

Friis, interviewed in the Futureview address at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival, was keen for the most part to convince the mostly-TV industry audience of the virtues of the nascent Joost service.

It was tough for Matt Wells, Guardian Unlimited's head of audio, who was conducting the interview, to extract anything other than textbook comments from Friis.

On the BBC iPlayer: "Great product, not as good as it will be".

On ITV, Channel 4 and BBC developing their own platforms for distribution: "It is like the retail category. Companies have a flagship store where they have their own branded experience and only their own products. Then they also distribute products through many other stores".

But a few nuggets emerged nevertheless. One wasn't that one name in the mix for the web TV service was the rather dodgy sounding Mowli (isn't that the name of Carphone Warehouse's animated mobile character?).

Friis did expand to say that Joost was "opening up" in a number of ways. This flexibility meant that it "could add pay-per-view in the future" and would "not rule out" introducing potentially lucrative adult content "sometime in the future".

When confronted with the sticky question of bandwidth issues - the same one the BBC is currently grappling with over potential mass-adoption of the iPlayer - Friis confidently answered that "the reality is the internet can cope. Cisco and ISPs can scale".

"Killer services" - such as TV content - will drive broadband uptake and usage, a good thing for ISPs surely, says Friis. "People don't get it (broadband) to get email".

This wasn't good enough for Magic Lantern's editorial development director Richard Ayers, the former portal director at Tiscali, who took Friis to task in the Q&A session claiming that "ISPs hate Joost".

Friis' response was that "people running ISPs" are in favour but those within the ISP world developing similar products don't like it.

"It is a schism within ISPs," he argued. Mr Ayers followed up by asking if in order to balance the extra costs of delivering TV over ISP networks, would Joost cut off a slice of ad revenue it makes?

"We are not negotiating to give up revenue," said Friis emphatically. "That is a slippery slope".

"If any ISP turned off eBay, Skype or YouTube other ISPs would find themselves with a lot of new users," is how he ended his defence on why ISPs are unlikely to get heavy-handed over the issue.

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