• by Ross Fadner , May 10, 2012

Joost, the online video service founded by Skype and KaZaa co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and once touted as the next big video content delivery platform, has quietly been suspended by its current owner, Adconion Media Group. On Wednesday, Adconion said it would subsume Joost Media into smartclip, a video ad company it acquired last fall.

Adconion, which suspended Joost’s service at the end of April, said the move was intended to boost smartclip’s presence in the U.S. Smartclip is a video advertising platform that sells different formats across most devices. Adconion claims smartclip is the leading digital video advertising company in Europe. More recently, smartclip expanded into Australia and Latin America.

Adconion doesn’t break out smartclip or Joost’s total reach, but it does say that Adconion’s global network across social, mobile, video, and email platforms has the potential to reach 687 million users.

As part of the integration, all of Joost’s clients and partners will be rolled into the smartclip platform.

“With the launch in the U.S., brands will benefit from the combination of the Joost Media team’s U.S. market experience and trusted relationships coupled with smartclip’s expertise and innovative multi-screen video ad products, that span across PC, mobile and Connected TV,” said Adconion President and CEO Tyler Moebius.

Joost debuted in beta in 2007 to great fanfare, which included several premium content deals and more than a million sign-ups This was mostly due to the fame of its co-founders and because its innovative platform delivered high-quality video using peer-to-peer technology, which Zennstrom and Friis had leveraged in creating the popular desktop applications Skype and KaZaa. But Joost failed to generate sufficient traffic and ad revenue, so the service was eventually sold to Adconion for an undisclosed amount.