As if Mac and MS haven’t already made it clear that the battle for the next generation boob tube revival is on the horizon, another team coming from the truly disruptive realm of technology have entered into this great race. The people that led the revolution that was Kaaza and Skype have now introduced a Web/TV technology which could change the way we watch TV. It’s called Joost. Does this follow suite with Kaaza and Skype, or will this technology enforce the lazy, addictive, controlled state of mind we get from our traditional television sets?

Joost is a new way of bringing the channel changing experience back into our digital lives. What makes it different is that instead of bringing the web to the TV, Joost brings the TV to the web. Joost isn’t user generated content like YouTube or Google Video. It’s more like satellite radio for TV broadcasting over the web, enabling us to watch made-for-web TV and just about every broadcast out there. Goodbye tele, hello lappy.

This is an interesting application on several levels, but for the most part it will introduce a divisive way to re-glue us to the latest “pop culture” content. Werdelin, a product manager with Joost (formally with MTV) says, “We want to be in the space where people are doing what they do now with TV, watching four to six hours a day… And a deeper relationship with customers. Not just deeper than TV, but deeper than most of what you get on the Net. I don’t think anyone really knows what those things are worth.”

Gluing the world to Web TV isn’t the only thing Joost will excel at… don’t forget, this technology will enable a focused onslaught of micro-targeted advertisements. Werdelin said with a hard-on, “We offer targeting they’ve never dreamed about in the TV world.” Clark, the Ad Sales chief, alludes to the wide spread opportunities: “Buy all the Desperate Housewives viewers in a zip code. Or the first thing a given viewer watches on a given day.”

Kaaza and Skype both disrupted the unstoppable inertia from the Music and Telecom industries. Kaaza gave us all gigabytes of MP3s. Maybe it wasn’t exactly legal and they had to settle for $150 million, but it enabled something great, something new and something we all needed. Skype gave us the ability to receive and make free phone calls over an internet connection anywhere in the world. Just like the music industry, telecoms had to step up there game and offer us something new, something better. The full power of Skype hasn’t been realized yet, but let’s hope they continue to realize its primary value. It’s Free.

From Kaaza to Skype to Joost… An ad driven model pandering to TV execs most whimsical advertising fantasies… I am not too sure about it, but we’ll just have to see. I think I’ll just stick to Tivo for now. (Insert three Tivo branded fast forward chimes here)

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