Joost strikes pact with JumpTV

Joost--an online video start-up founded by the guys who built Kazaa and Skype--appears to have struck a distribution deal with JumpTV, which owns the rights to 270 TV stations in 70 countries.

According to Time magazine, Joost and JumpTV will soon announce their deal, which comes on the heels of a previous arrangement that brought Viacom programming--Paramount movies, MTV, Comedy Central and more--to Joost.

Ultimately, the idea seems to be that by gaining control over huge amounts of premium content, Joost will be able to convince Internet users to abandon YouTube, since the Google-owned service has few rights to such programming. YouTube did strike a deal with NBC, but Joost's partnerships would seem to dwarf that deal, particularly because by working with JumpTV, it gains access to content that will appeal to a wide international audience.

It will be interesting to see what YouTube does next to try to keep up. But for Web users? It's nothing but a big victory.