Joost: 1M Beta users, Launch by year end

TechCrunch is reporting that Joost Currently has 1 million users, still in the beta and that the official launch will come by the end of the year.

Joost (IPA pronunciation: 'jew-st') is a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name "The Venice Project", Zennström and Friis (Skype founders) assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse.

Joost, which raised $45 million in venture capital in May, is one of the trendy startups right now. And they’ve benefited from some of YouTube’s legal woes by becoming the partner of choice for the anti-Google crowd.

Some complain that online TV should come through the browser, not a new application like Joost (which, however, is built partially on the Mozilla application framework). But Joost is a solid application that is attracting some well known content owners.