Joost, the online video service founded by the creators of Internet phone service Skype and file-sharing service Kazaa, is a first timer attending Allen Co.’s Sun Valley conference, one of the most influential annual get-togethers of the media and tech elites. Reuters caught up with Joost’s recently named Chief Executive Mike Volpi, formerly of Cisco.

Reuters: Media companies seem more willing to explore deals with Internet distributors these days. Why?
Volpi: The time in the market is good for traditional media and digital coming together. Technology has matured to a point where rights can be protected properly. That gives a lot of comfort to media executives worried about their content. The distribution and reach of the Internet as a platform is something that media executives are increasingly realizing is important for their business. That creates interesting opportunities for companies like us that distribute media in a proper, rights-managed kind of way using the Internet as a platform.

Reuters: Everyones talking about PC-to-TV. How does Joost plan to play that?
Volpi: We think TV is an important platform. We designed our systems to be compatible with TVs in the future. But we also target a demographic, young people, who are quite comfortable watching programming on PCs. Both are very very relevant and its not a either or. Its an and for us.

Reuters: What do you hope to accomplish here?
Volpi: There are a lot of people here, who are our partners today or will be our partners in the content business (tomorrow). We live and die by the kind of rich content we put on our platform … There are some important advertisers here that will put their ads on our platform.

Reuters: Your background is in M&A, should we read deeply into your appointment?
Volpi: Not really. I got branded pretty strongly with M&A, but I havent been really doing that since 2000. I did that in my early years at Cisco. More recently, Ive been spending more of my time one of Ciscos large businesses. M&A was an interesting thing to do in the past, but theres no special message in that.

Reuters : So it’s safe to say that Joost is committed to being independent?
Volpi: Yeah. Were a little company, with heads down, trying to build a decent business.

Reuters: Theres been a lot said about where Joost is heading, about Joost being made available on different devices.
Volpi: Right now Joost is PC-based. We have the option of doing it on a lot of different systems. A lot of people on blogs give us interesting recommendations. For now, our priority is on the PC. There are plenty of people that will watch our programming on PCs.

(Photo: Former Viacom CEO Tom Freston (l), Joost CEO Mike Volpi (r) / Reuters/Rick Wilking)