What exactly did Adconion buy? Some of Joost’s technology, as well as its trademark, and about a dozen of the company’s remaining 25 employees, a spokeswoman says.

So what does that leave? Does any part of the original Joost survive as an operating company? “I believe so,” says the spokeswoman, who is going to get back to us about that.

Price? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m guessing it’s not going to be very much, and nothing close to what investors like Sequoia, Index and Viacom (VIA) were hoping when they plowed $45 million into the company more than two years ago. Index, by the way, is also an investor in Adconion and led an $80 million C funding round in February 2008.

In any case, this is all a matter of “i” dotting and “t” crossing, as Joost has officially been in hospice mode since June, when the company laid off most of its employees and replaced CEO Mike Volpi. Prior to that, Volpi and his investors had been trying to broker a sale of the company, hoping that they could convince a big infrastructure player like Comcast (CMCSA) or Time Warner Cable (TWC) to bail it out.

No dice, though Time Warner Cable did end up hiring some technical help from Joost.

ADCONION MEDIA GROUP ACQUIRES JOOST ASSETS

New Capabilities Provide Advertisers, Content Owners and Publishers with an End-to-End
Cross-Channel Video Solution

SANTA MONICA, CALIF. – NOVEMBER 24, 2009 — Adconion Media Group (www.adconion.com), the largest independent global audience and content network, announced today that it has acquired certain assets from privately-held Joost, the online video service. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution,” said Tyler Moebius, CEO, Adconion Media Group. “This acquisition immediately brings additional scale and content to the Adconion video pre-roll network for clients who are looking for a safe, cost-effective alternative to achieve the maximum value of online video advertising. We’ll also continue to operate Joost.com, providing clients with a destination site to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment content.”

In June, Joost announced a change in its business strategy to focus on providing white-label video platforms, and Adconion plans to pursue this strategy. On Friday, Adconion announced its first long-term licensing partnership as the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for the Goldbach Media Group in Europe.

The acquisition of Joost assets adds many dimensions to Adconion’s existing video services and further will solidify its position in the online video and content syndication market. Prior to the acquisition, Adconion offered targeted distribution of content, including video and television commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV; as well as customized branded entertainment solutions for clients through its exclusive relationship with the digital studio RedLever. Through the Joost acquisition, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll advertisements across 2,000 premium publishers.

Janus Friis, co-founder of Joost, said, “Over the past few months we have been actively exploring strategic options for Joost, and have concluded that the sale of certain of its assets to Adconion is in the best interests of Joost. Adconion has a strong technological platform and a compelling business model, and we believe that both businesses will benefit as a result of this acquisition.”

A leader in advertising innovation, targeting and distribution, Adconion reaches nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis. Prior to the Joost acquisition, Adconion was serving more than 80 million video streams per day to targeted audiences across 2,000 global websites.

We’re seeing lots of that as the last bubble shakes out (see: MySpace and iLike, Facebook and FriendFeed). But that strategy also raises plenty of eyebrows from other buyers, who figure that they’re happy to let a struggling company fold, then pick up the talent piece by piece.

Did that just happen with Joost and Time Warner Cable (TWC)? Looks like it.

The cable provider has snapped up former Joost CTO Jason Gaedtke. The company tells Cable Digital News that Gaedtke will report to Mike Hayashi, the multiple system operator’s executive vice president of advanced engineering.

The assumption is that Gaedtke will be helping the company build out its own version of “TV Everywhere,” the Web-video-for-subscribers scheme that everyone from Comcast (CMCSA) to AT&T (T) is trying out.

Not an earth-shattering hire, but I’m noting it here because prior to Joost’s decision to all-but-pull-the-plug, the start-up was trying to peddle itself to buyers like…Time Warner Cable.

The theory: The Web video company hadn’t been able to generate much business, but it had a lot of smart people who could help, say, a cable company build out its own Web video strategy.

So, given that the Web video industry is in the midst of a long-awaited contraction, is Gaedtke’s hire the kind of thing that could undermine other potential deals? We’ll see.

A good bet: Veoh, one of the best-funded would-be YouTubes. Multiple sources tell me the company is aggressively marketing itself in hopes of finding a buyer.

And if a deal does go through, it will result in a loss for the company’s high-profile backers, who include former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner and Goldman Sachs (GS). I’m told that CEO Dmitry Shapiro has been shopping the company at prices below $70 million, which is the amount investors have sunk into the portal since 2005.

What happened to Veoh? The same thing that happened to almost every other Web video portal that isn’t Google’s (GOOG) YouTube or Hulu: Not enough audience, not enough ad revenue, too many costs.

Veoh claims an audience of about 25 million users, which is less than auditors like comScore (SCOR) report, and is, in any case, an order of magnitude smaller than YouTube’s. Sources tell me the company lost money on revenue of about $6 million last year. Sales are up and executives are optimistic it could break even this year, but the trajectory isn’t high enough to keep Veoh afloat as an independent company.

Complicating matters for Veoh is a costly court battle with Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, which accuses the company of copyright violations. That two-year-old fight has cost the start-up millions in legal fees.

The fact that Veoh’s backers include media-savvy players like Time Warner (TWX); former Viacom executives Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen; and Spark Capital, one of the primary investors in Twitter, hasn’t been enough to help the company extricate itself from the suit.

In April, Veoh laid off a good chunk of its staff, replaced CEO Steve Mitgang with Shapiro, the company’s founder, and focused its energy on a new “Video Compass” player that users are supposed to download and install in their Web browsers.

At the time, Shapiro said that the company’s Web portal business was a success but acknowledged that “quite frankly, there are a lot of things like that.”

So who would buy Veoh? Theoretically, at the right price, the company could be attractive to a large Web player like a Yahoo (YHOO), which used to be a big player in video back when video was a small market. Or the company could try marketing its technical expertise to a cable/telco company like Time Warner Cable (TWC) that hasn’t done much with online video but says it will soon.

But rival Web portal Joost tried making the same pitch to various buyers over the last few months and couldn’t get a deal done. Last week Joost laid off most of its staff and said it would try to go it alone as a services company.

This kind of flux is now par for the course among the big Web portals that thought they could rival YouTube, or at least secure second place. But Google’s lead over everyone else in video gets bigger every day, and its primary competitor is now Hulu, which has the advantage of premium content from its Hollywood owners–Disney, GE’s (GE) NBC Universal, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox.

In addition to Veoh and Joost, France’s DailyMotion has swapped out CEOs in recent months and is reportedly looking to raise money. Meanwhile, Metacafe, yet another video hub, has hired boutique investment bank Think Equity to look for “strategic investors to provide expansion capital.”

Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg says his company doesn’t need the money and can survive on its own if it doesn’t go ahead with a deal. “You would expect in this marketplace that you’re going to have a shakeout, and the stronger players are going to make it,” he says.

That sounds right. The question is whether we’ll have more than two players left when this is all over.

The service is laying off the majority of its employees, and CEO Mike Volpi (pictured right) is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering. The Joost.com portal site will stay open, but best to think of it as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable companies and the like.

A Joost spokesperson declined to say how deep the layoffs will be; but I’m told that the company, which had more than 100 employees last fall, will be down to a couple dozen after the cuts are done. In a post on Joost’s Web site, Volpi said the company “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends.”

This isn’t a shock: Joost’s fate has been the subject of whisper and rumors for the last year or more. The service made an initial splash in 2007 by raising $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom (VIA), and was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops.

But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, the company had retooled and began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience. In November, a month after the company launched its Web browser, it said it was attracting 2.1 million unique users world-wide, a fraction of YouTube’s audience, and well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Here’s the service’s unique visitor count, per Comscore (SCOR); Joost’s unique viewer count, which is the more relevant metric for video sites, is considerably smaller (click to enlarge):

Joost has been a frequent candidate for buyout rumors, and the company hasn’t gone out of its way to deny them. The supposed buyers would be cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) or telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), which would presumably use Joost’s technical team to help build out their own Web video plays.

But some of the cable guys and telcos insist that they’re fine with the people they have. And if they do want to buy a video player, they have plenty of options: Just about all of Joost’s peers have been on the block, formally or informally, for the past few months.

JOOST TO PROVIDE WHITE LABEL ONLINE VIDEO PLATFORM

NEW YORK AND LONDON – June 30, 2009 – Joost, the online video startup, announced today that, along with Joost.com, it will focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online.

Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive. Joost will focus on this issue and provide the market with a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands.

As a part of this new direction, Joost will reorganize and restructure its business. A core team in New York and London will work on providing these solutions, as well as operating and supporting Joost.com and its associated video applications. Joost also will wind down operations in its Leiden development center.

Matt Zelesko, currently SVP of Engineering at Joost, will take over as CEO while continuing to lead the engineering organization. Stacey Seltzer, currently SVP of international business development and content acquisition at Joost, will run the business operations. Mike Volpi has stepped down as CEO of Joost but will remain actively involved as Chairman of the Board.

Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.

Here’s one small step in that evolution: Joost, the once-hyped video site, is going to start selling ads for clips it shows via its Apple (AAPL) iPhone app. Doing the heavy lifting will be FreeWheel, a well-regarded start-up that already handles ad-serving for some of the Web’s biggest video players.

As with video, everyone knows the mobile ad market will be worth something–maybe a lot–one day. But right now, there’s no there there. The Internet Advertising Bureau, for instance, doesn’t even bother to break out mobile ads in its annual breakdown of digital marketing spend.

Still, Joost needs any boost it can get: Like a lot of other video start-ups in the past few years, the company has raised an awful lot of money but hasn’t made much of a dent in the market. Maybe it can get some traction by staking an early claim to mobile video. Last week, Veoh, another well-funded video site chasing after the same eyeballs, made drastic cuts to its staff and announced that it would put its resources into a new browser-based app.

Separately, the Joost announcement is a nice get for FreeWheel, which is staffed by veterans of Google’s (GOOG) DoubleClick, and which last I heard, was looking for a significant funding round.

In the meantime, Hulu wants us to know that:

• It’s now the biggest video site that isn’t Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, at least according to one count. Nielsen’s VideoCensus pegs the site’s February traffic at 309 million video views, which puts it ahead of News Corp.’s MySpace and Yahoo (YHOO). But as AdAge’s Michael Learmonth notes, it’s still not on the same playing field as YouTube, which generated 5.2 billion views during the same period.
• It’s not just a video site, it’s a social network. Or at least, it now has some social-network-like features, like the ability to share favorite clips with your pals. TV.com, Sling.com, Joost, et al, do something similar. The good news is that Hulu lets you import connections from Facebook, MySpace, Google, etc. The bad news is that this won’t appease broadcast and cable TV executives who worry that Hulu takes eyeballs away from their offerings, despite what someone told The Wall Street Journal today.
• Hulu users really, really like their “Saturday Night Live.” The show’s clips accounted for nine of the ten most emailed clips in the last year and eight of the ten most viewed videos that were embedded in other sites. Like this one.

But until then, if you want to see your favorite stuff on the Web (legally), you’ll need a well-annotated map: You can see ABC shows like “Lost” on Veoh, but not on Joost. Joost can show you stuff like CBS’s “CSI,” but not NBC’s “Heroes”–you’ll need to go to NBC.com or Hulu for that. Etc.

The newest set of directions: You’ll soon be able to see Viacom shows like Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob Square Pants” and MTV’s “The Hills” on Sling.com, giving the video site something you can’t get on Hulu or Google’s (GOOG) YouTube–but can get on Joost and DailyMotion.

Except that Hulu already shows full episodes of two of Viacom’s premiere shows–”The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”–via a one-off deal with Viacom (VIA). And… Sling redistributes all of Hulu’s content except for those two shows. [UPDATE: Sling will be getting both of those shows under terms of the new Viacom deal, I'm told.]

Confused? Of course you are. Because there really isn’t any rhyme or reason to this.

So while the networks and the video sites spend time on business development deals, it’s hard to begrudge those who throw up their hands and just go find what they want when they want at various torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

In the meantime, here’s a (legal) clip from last night’s Daily Show, via Hulu.

Because they can, of course. And because the presidency-to-be has already provided a short-term boost for media companies who’ve been able to feed the public’s appetite for all things Obama. The New York Times, for example, says it generated $2.3 million in much-needed extra revenue via the sale of its commemorative election day edition and other paraphernalia.

So it will be nearly impossible to boot up your browser on Tuesday and not end up watching a live stream of the pomp and circumstance; the actual swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for noon Eastern Standard Time.

But just in case your online venue of choice gets the hiccups, here’s a list of sites that promise to provide coverage; I’ve also embedded a stream from Hulu (which is using the Fox broadcast’s feed) at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer to stay right here.

I’m sure I’ve probably missed several dozen options: If you’ve got a site you want to add to the list, do so in comments below or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.

Presidential Inauguration Committee (Microsoft-haters beware: This stream will require the company’s Silverlight player)

Joint Congressional Committee

New York Times

Washington Post

ABC News

CNN (features obligatory Facebook tie-in)

C-SPAN

CBS News

MSNBC

Fox News

Joost (Joost would like to point out that unlike some of the options listed here, its feed will be available for  international audiences).

Current TV (features obligatory Twitter tie-in)

Livestation (requires download; player allows viewers to flip between coverage from Al Jazeera, C-Span, BBC, euronews, France 24, Russia Today).

One major video outlet that apparently won’t be streaming the event live: The biggest–Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But YouTube’s Inauguration Channel is serving up plenty of video during the run-up.

And if you couldn’t score tickets to the Huffington Post’s pre-inaugural ball Monday night with the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and, um, Ashton Kutcher, don’t fret: The news aggregator promises to provide both live video and live blogging of the event.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy: