Joost, the online video portal backed by Skype's co-founders that has eaten $45 million in venture capital, announced it is scaling back its operations to focus on back-end support for other platforms and its CEO Mike Volpi is stepping down. Volpi is rumored to be in the running [1] for the CEO spot at British broadcaster ITV. Joost SVP of Engineering Matt Zelesko will fill the vacant CEO position while continuing to serve as head of the engineering department.

Joost also said it would be cutting its payroll as part of the restructuring and "winding down" a Leiden, Netherlands, development center, while keeping a core team in its New York and London offices to handle the transition and ongoing site upkeep.

Attempting to spin the downsizing and refocusing as a strategic, rather than economic, move, Joost said in its release that it would focus now on building white-label video portals for media companies that are "cost-effective, end-to-end solutions for media companies to publish videos under their own brand."

Joost was rumored to be on the auction block in April, but after Comcast balked [2] and no other buyer emerged, a lack of outside funding likely promped the need to scale back operations.

For more:
- see the press release here [3] 

Related articles
Comcast turns down Joost, company still shopping itself [4]
Joost releases web-based player [5]