Joost Pushes Its Video Through Netlog, Keeping It In The Family

VOD site Joost and pan-European social network Netlog, have signed a content sharing partnership giving the latter’s 41 million users access to Joost’s 57,000 TV shows, music videos and films. Joost benefits through more exposure and traffic for its catalogue and ads, while Netlog has some extra stickiness to keep its young audience coming back.

The Joost/Netlog connection is not such a shock. The pair have a venture capital backer, Index Ventures, in common. Index has been actively promoting its portfolio companies’ interests of late eg. creating a Twitter feed to blast out their messages. If it was responsible for marrying Joost and Netlog, then it’s a strategy that mirrors a recent link-up between music player We7 and music recommendation service The Filter. Both individually backed by Peter Gabriel’s Real World Group, the companies recently began sharing technology.

In this link-up, all Netlog members will be kept up to date with Joost activity in their main news feed and will be able to show friends their viewing habits and opinions of shows. Joost will be creating or commissioning content specific to Netlog’s key markets of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

This is the second video site to sign a content-sharing deal this week: on Monday US VOD site Hulu signed a deal to syndicate its 40,000 TV show and film videos to French VOD site Dailymotion.com, but unfortunately for Europeans it only extends to America.

By Patrick Smith , Paid content, Thu 05 Mar 2009