The Future of Video is on the Web !

Is television dead? If you ask the guys from Current and Joost, they’ll tell you point-blank that it’s not — even though what’s on it isn’t very compelling.

“The only problem with television is that most television sucks,” said Current TV CEO Joel Hyatt, pictured above in the center seat.

“If television were dead, people wouldn’t spend four hours a day watching it, and we wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars to bring it to the internet.”

Joost CEO Mike Volpi, who joined Hyatt on a panel about the future of video at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Friday, echoed his statement. He also added that the big media companies don’t quite grok how to play the web to their advantage.

“The internet is the best place to put cutting edge and fresh content,” said Volpi. “The major content providers don’t get that yet. They are still providing us and our competitors with content that’s older or dated.”

The panel, which was expertly moderated by GigaOm’s Om Malik, was a small but lively one. Joost’s Volpi in particular came off as sounding especially keyed-in to where web video is heading. His company’s product, a high-quality video streaming service, uses a P2P engine behind the scenes.

It’s a forward-thinking distribution model that Volpi contends is scalable beyond everyone’s wildest traffic predictions.

“We’re streaming, not downloading, so Joost has far less an ability to clog the pipe,” he said. “When Joost gets big enough where we have providers complaining about how much bandwidth our users are consuming, i’ll be a very happy man.”

Right now, Joost runs on the Windows and Mac desktop as a stand-alone client. A member of the audience asked if a browser-based Joost experience was a possibility down the road.

Volpi says they’re is working on it, and that Joost will run in the browser “not too far in the distant future.”