By Alexandra Berzon

First MTV, now TV Chile?

Internet TV broadcaster Joost won’t formally launch for another few months, but it’s wasted no time in lining up eclectic content that analysts say could steal away some of YouTube’s audience.

The Luxembourg-based startup will announce Friday that it has signed with JumpTV, a Toronto-based Internet television broadcaster that culls content from stations in 70 countries around the world. JumpTV seeks to appeal to immigrant populations in the United States and Western Europe who want to watch shows from their home countries.

Western Europe

On Joost, that content will be added in channels that play high-quality full-screen videos on a peer-to-peer network through software that users download on their computers.

That news comes on the heels of a recent revenue-sharing deal with Viacom for MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Studios content. Other Joost channels broadcast shows from the likes of National Geographic and Voy, which targets Latino youth.

Those deals suggest that Joost is interested in just about any type of content, but attracting young viewers is an especially high priority.

“Early adopters of the platform are going to be of a younger generation, so we’re looking for things that will be popular with those generations,” said Stacey Seltzer, senior vice president of content strategy and acquisition for Joost. “But we also want to make sure that we can provide content that may appeal to anyone.”

To start out, Joost will feature JumpTV’s Spanish language series from Columbia, Chile, and Peru, along with Arabic-language comedy, drama, and news from Middle Eastern broadcasters. Eventually, Joost will have access to more JumpTV content from countries like Romania, Turkey, and Russia. Live international stations broadcast through JumpTV are also in the works.

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New Media Darling

Mr. Seltzer said more big deals are on the way. Joost has become the new media darling since founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom declared the service was designed specifically to cater to the interests of professional media companies. Copyright protection? Revenue? No problem, the founders say to anyone who will listen.

That kind of language could be interpreted as a jab at YouTube, which has run into its share of copyright issues of late. But it’s more a reference to Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis’s past, which includes inventing Kazaa, a video-sharing service that infuriated media companies to the tune of a more than $100-million settlement, and Skype, the VoIP service that scared telecommunications companies and was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

“If there is a serious challenger to YouTube, this could be it,” said analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media. “They are reformed sinners. They don’t have a halo, but they have been at the front end of the new waves of the Internet.”

JumpTV, on the other hand, has found Internet television to be a more difficult field—at least for paid subscribers. That side of Jump’s business has signed up 30,000 paid subscribers a year and a half into the current service. The company now does most of its business selling content to other providers.

But as one of the early recruits, JumpTV, of course, is rooting for Joost to succeed. “I’m not smart enough about this whole thing to see how it’s going to play out,” said Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, president of JumpTV International. “I can tell you it’s going to be disruptive.”