Piczo absorbed, Joost up next?

News today on Venturebeat that Piczo has been sold ( as in near-given away ) to Stardoll, naturally as a synergistic play for both parties, though its Piczo who will be the one synergised:

Piczo will be operated from Stardoll’s Stockholm headquarters. Notably, the only Piczo employee who will move to Stardoll a European sales director. Stardoll’s Miksche (pictured left, in all of his avatar glory) claims that Stardoll’s staff of 80 can run additional sites.

Six months is a good "phoney war" time - its taken from September's Crunch till now for the equity backers of the failed models to see if they can hang onto the liferaft longer than anyone else. It was clear several months ago that Piczo was a Zombie company, staggering on until someone mercifully bought it out - and there are many others still staggering along.

I'm at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference today, and was thinking about who may be in the same position in this space - companies whose models have failed and are staggering on.

Its become clear to me from today's presentations that Joost and similar are as dead in the water as Piczo was (many newer, later-design Web TV startups have overtaken them in users, (they are c 190,000 per month vs iPlayer 5 million), as the Hulu/YouTube, BBC iPlayer WebTV and the STB based IPTV models pull ahead, and Canvas and various "Server Side TiVos" emerge as the next step.

So, who will buy Joost, one wonders?

Update - Kate Larkin from Joost notes in the comments that Joost's values are higher than the ones presented today @ c 3m users per annum (about 250,000 per month I calculate).