''Ethnic'' Web video co lands Joost deal

NEW YORK: JumpTV, which offers "ethnic" television programming on the Internet, said it will announce a deal on Friday to offer some of its shows for free on Joost, an online video service launched by the founders of Skype and Kazaa.

The Canadian firm offers 270 channels of TV programs from 70 countries, including Albania, Bahrain, Pakistan and Korea on a subscription and free basis.

Joost, which uses the same Internet peer-to-peer filing sharing technology that has upset the music industry, launched in January as an advertising-supported Internet television network.

A deal to distribute hundreds of hours of programming from Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks and Paramount movies studio helped Joost boost its profile.

More media deals are expected to come over the next few weeks, a Joost executive said last week.

"Given the track record of the Joost founders, we believe that the Joost platform could be as transformational for online television as their previous ventures have been," Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, president and chief executive officer of JumpTV said in a statement.

Joost was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, two Scandinavian entrepreneurs who created Web phone service Skype, which they sold to eBay Inc., and file-sharing network Kazaa.

JumpTV will launch on Joost initially with Spanish-language series from Colombia, Chile and Peru, and an Arabic-language comedy, the company said.

Channels in other languages from JumpTV currently slated to launch on Joost include Romanian, Turkish, Russian and Bengali.

© Reuters