What ever happened to Joost? The company that was hailed the bridge between the television and Internet worlds, Joost came out of the gate with a strong founding team and several millions in investment funding. Joost went on to gain the support of major media companies and, finally, the content distributors themselves. Yet every step of the way Joost seemed to end up one step behind.

Joost’s inability to ultimately take the lead on the web-based, premium content service providers reflected a unique state of purgatory in dealing with technology. This failure was emphasized with today’s announcement that the Adconion Media Group has acquired Joost for its assets. The financial details around this acquisition were not disclosed.

After Joost continuously found itself in a place of missed opportunity, the forces behind the company struggled to look for a way out. Joost went from a desktop video software provider to an online streaming video service, eventually taking a focus on the production of white label video streaming tools. Joost has also turned to pre-clip advertising methods, moving far from its initial plan of a more formally integrated advertising scheme. Things could have been worse for Joost, but one thing was for sure; Joost never reached its full potential.

Was it the fault of over-funding, or was there merely a gap between the vision of Joost and its execution? Joost had slid in under the radar just as web-based companies were starting to regain a foothold in the consumer market. With so much support from such a wide array of investors in the media industry, Joost carried a great deal of hope for monetizing the web’s ability to more successfully and efficiently stream video.

Taking a top-down approach to implementing such a service on consumer’s desktops meant gaining the respect and financial support of nearly the entire media industry. This was long before the days of $1.65 billion YouTube acquisitions or broadcast network-run services such as Hulu.

Yet there was so much hype generated around Joost that the product was never able to be brought to the market per its initial expectations. By the time major media companies rallied around Joost the model of downloadable software had been replaced with YouTube-like streaming and embedding. Joost had to shift gears, taking on a new model and a new competitor. At each stage, Joost’s vision was again misaligned with the current market.

Nevertheless, all was not last with Joost. Under Adconion Joost will continue on its re-focused path to develop white label video services. Moving forward the need for such services will be merged with other forms of software services, cloud computing and enterprise necessities.

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