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When broadcasters and television producers were given a sneak peek yesterday at Joost - the highly anticipated TV website that is preparing for its public unveiling in the next few months - what they saw was a giant snake.

It was an accidental move by Joost's senior vice-president, Stacey Seltzer, who randomly chose one of the site's 150-plus channels to demonstrate to those at the Banff World Television Festival how the Internet video site works.

But the 20-foot image of a hissing cobra, streaming live on one of Joost's nature channels that are still in test mode, was fitting for Web TV. In the TV industry's eyes, Web players such as YouTube are the ones who have slithered into the industry over the past two years, taking content for free, fragmenting audiences and not compensating the networks or the producers.

Joost, which has spent the better part of the past year trying to sign broadcasters and producers to legitimate content deals, is trying to avoid being the next snake in the grass. In perhaps one of the clearest signals of the massive shift from TV to the Internet, Joost executives have arrived at this year's festival ready to make deals with producers. In a sense, they are operating just as any network might: sitting in and listening to excited pitches from hopeful writers looking to pen the next hit and deciding where to spend.

"We came here to meet with people in the digital space, talk about new ideas ...," Seltzer said yesterday. "But now we're taking the next couple of days to meet with all the different kinds of providers and work on deals with them."

And like a traditional broadcaster, Joost brought its chequebook. The Web-TV start-up has 37 advertisers lined up so far and is willing to share that money with content providers who climb aboard.

Joost already has agreements in place with Canadian players CHUM Ltd. and JumpTV, but it hasn't launched publicly yet. That is expected by the end of summer. Until then, Joost is in test mode.

The start-up, launched by the creators of the controversial file-sharing site Kazaa and the Internet talk service Skype, which sold to eBay in 2005, is a pure Web-TV idea. While YouTube operates on a small screen with grainy, often pirated content, Joost wants to do legitimate deals for programs that can be shown full-screen.

And it still has a long way to go. While Joost has signed deals with heavy hitters such as CBS/Viacom, it still lacks the major deals for the top shows on television, which observers believe will be what eventually moves Web TV into the mainstream.