Disclaimer: I worked at Joost. To be fair, I think there were some mistakes in technology, but I agree 100% that your main point about content acquisition was

Disclaimer: I worked at Joost. To be fair, I think there were some mistakes in technology, but I agree 100% that your main point about content acquisition was the real nail in the coffin. But using P2P, RDF, Proprietary Server Side Javascript, technology offices in 5 or 6 countries; These are all things that certainly didn't help. Building on P2P part was built around the premiss that bandwidth would stay expensive, but it didn't. But at the same time, when Joost started, every premium content owner out there wanted realish DRM, so you still would of had a thick client. Later we actually switched to Flash and HTTPS, because bandwidth was cheap, and content owners stopped carrying nearly as much, but the problem of content acquisition still meant we had zero unique content.