» see justin.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine
justin.tv launched on 19 march 2007. justin kan strapped a webcam to a baseball cap, ran the feed through a backpack laptop, and broadcast his life 24/7. it was an early Y combinator startup. the founders included justin kan, emmett shear, michael seibel, and kyle vogt. the site was the original lifecasting platform.
the lifecast did not work as a business. nobody else wanted to wear a webcam all day. so they pivoted to a general streaming platform where anyone could broadcast anything. by 2009 there were thousands of channels. people were broadcasting concerts, sports events, and gaming sessions.
i remember justin.tv from 2009 to 2011 as the place to watch sports streams. the turkish national football matches that were on a channel my house didn't have a subscription to often had a live feed on justin.tv. the streams were gray-area copyright. the site played whack-a-mole with takedowns. you would find a stream, watch for ten minutes, get a takedown, find another. half the audience was doing the same thing.
the gaming streams were a small subsection of the platform until they were not. in june 2011 the gaming category got spun out into its own brand called twitch.tv. twitch grew faster than the parent. amazon bought twitch in august 2014 for around $970 million. on 5 august 2014 the parent justin.tv site was shut down. twitch absorbed everything.
| Born | 19 March 2007 |
|---|---|
| Killed | 5 August 2014 (parent brand shut down) |
| Lifespan | ~7 years |
| Made by | Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, Kyle Vogt |
| Killed by | its own twitch.tv subsidiary, which was bought by amazon for $970M |
the streaming infrastructure was unusual for the time. justin.tv built their own video distribution network because youtube live did not exist yet. ustream was a competitor. the technical work of streaming live video at scale was hard in 2007 to 2009. justin.tv's engineering team built a custom CDN-like layer that became the basis for what is now twitch's infrastructure.
the channel format was simple. you started a channel, you set up an encoder (most people used XSplit or wirecast), you went live. anyone could watch. there was a chat box. you could record streams and replay them. the model has not changed much since then. modern twitch is a more refined version of what justin.tv was.
the live sports problem killed any chance of being a clean product. the sports streams brought traffic. the sports streams were also rights violations. the site got DMCA notices constantly. dealing with takedowns was a full-time engineering job. the gaming category did not have this problem because game studios mostly liked the free advertising.
the gaming streams were a small subsection until 2010. that year the audience for stream-watching of gaming content started growing fast. league of legends was launching. starcraft 2 was launching. dota 2 was in beta. the esports scene was forming. justin.tv was where these communities ended up.
on 6 june 2011 the company spun out the gaming category as twitch.tv. emmett shear ran twitch. justin kan stayed with the parent. the bet was that gaming was a focused, growing audience worth a dedicated brand. the bet worked faster than they expected. by 2013 twitch had more traffic than the parent justin.tv. by 2014 the parent looked like a legacy site sitting next to twitch.
amazon bought twitch in august 2014 for $970M. google had reportedly tried to buy it for $1B and pulled out over antitrust concerns about a youtube tie-up. amazon won the bid. as part of the deal, justin.tv as a brand was shut down. the company refocused entirely on twitch.
the gray-area sports stream culture. justin.tv was where you went when your local broadcast didn't have the match. that role got taken over by reddit threads, telegram channels, and a long tail of dedicated piracy sites. none of them have justin.tv's openness. justin.tv was not designed for piracy but it tolerated it more than its successors do.
the lifecasting attempt. the original justin kan webcam-on-a-cap thing was actually interesting as a concept. it failed as a business but it was a real attempt to ask "what if you could just broadcast your whole life." that question got answered later, badly, by instagram stories and snapchat. the version justin.tv tried was more honest about what it was.
the pre-twitch streaming web. justin.tv, ustream, livestream, blip.tv, stickam. there was a whole landscape of streaming platforms in 2008 to 2011 before twitch became the default for gaming and youtube live became the default for everything else. that landscape collapsed into two big players. justin.tv was the most influential of the casualties because it was also the parent of one of the survivors.
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