What do you do when Internet giant eBay buys your ground-breaking technology company, jet off to a tropical beach somewhere?

Well, if you’re the guys who gave us Skype, you don’t. You start again. They’ve invented a way to bring real, full screen TV on the Internet. Ladies and gentlemen and media moguls, I give you joost.

All the hype about FaceBook and social networking is masking another revolution. With TV audiences gradually dwindling, people are spending far more of their time on the Internet. So what happens when the Internet can show you your favourite TV programmes?

Thank you and goodnight, this is your television station signing off.

Joost is already offering over 400 channels featuring 20,000 or more shows, or specifically in this context, pieces of content. All delivered to us for free and on-demand. Stick that up your satellite, Mr Murdoch.

The fact that this is available already, admittedly it’s still at a late beta stage, gives you some idea of the potential for this medium and its likely impact on conventional terrestrial and satellite television.

It brings into sharp focus the ignorance and myopia of the current broadcasters. To be fair, the bbc alone are investing substantially in new technologies, but stand alone in their field and ultimately will be constrained by corporate over-prudence and lack of imagination.

Not so the Internet’s brave band of innovators. Joost’s Danish founder and head of content development, Philip Petersen has proved that with this new venture, he wasn’t just a one-trick pony.

Skype turned a VoIP world dominated by high-cost providers like Cisco and Nortel and put it in the reach of anyone with a PC and a broadband connection. Joost does the same for TV. And just like Skype before it, It doesn’t need any costly hardware to deliver its content. It uses similar clever technology too…

Social Collaboration or Power from the People

When the idea of Internet TV was first suggested, the conventional techies all pulled the suggestion apart. Pointing to a lack of bandwidth and the fact that connections are shared and therefore too slow to deliver real TV quality.

But innovators rarely let existing methods get in the way of progress. Joost harnesses Peer-to-Peer techniques (P2P) to assemble content from a wide range of computers in real time, while you’re watching.

Constructing a programme from many jigsaw puzzles

The more a programme is watched, the more bits are available to assemble it. This cancels out sharing issues caused by network limitations. This technology turns conventional thinking on its head. Think of it as assembling a jigsaw but instead of only one piece fitting, many are available.

The Skype legacy

Joost was created so quickly because many of the elements were already used to deliver Skype. Skype’s pioneers, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström harnessed the same technologies to enable Skype to use limited broadband network speeds.

With broadband now becoming faster despite BT’s restrictive and archaic framework, services like Skype and Joost are threatening the over-priced dominance of conventional providers. And for us as consumers, that’s a good thing.

So, can I ditch my TV?

Sorry. No, not yet. While Joost is a major step forward, its a light-bulb in a football stadium. It shows the way, but we’ll have to wait for the floodlights to be turned on before – if you’ll parden the pun – we see the whole picture.

Outside the browser

It’s a pity Joost needs software to be downloaded to run the service, in the same way as Skype. Had it been available through a browser, it would have been the true killer app. Maybe later?

Currently Joost has signed up heavyweights like Time-Warner, Viacom and Endemol. This gives you just some idea of how seriously the big players are taking Joost.

The content is pretty US-biased, but a more rounded range of UK and European content is bound to follow. So, should we shed a tear for conventional broadcasters?

Absolutely not. Conventional broadcasters had their chance. Never mourn those who won’t change, only those who can’t.