Justin.tv Debuts Live-Streamed Video Gaming Portal And Community TwitchTV

Startup Justin.tv has long offered live video streaming through its web platform as well as through various mobile apps. In fact, Justin.tv serves more than 300 million live videos per month. But besides streaming events, the startup hasn’t really expanded to categorized verticals. Until now. Today, Justin.tv is unveiling TwitchTV, a live-streamed video game portal and community for gamers.

TwitchTV features competitions of a variety of games and platforms with top gamers, tournaments and commentary. The platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for live video for ‘eSports,’ which Justin.tv says is synonymous with competitive video gaming. The company says because of the massive presence of online video in the gaming space, a live video portal for the vertical made sense.

The startup says that the portal soft launched a few months ago and has already seen an increase in engagement with the videos. Gamers are watching about 4.5 hours of video per month, and the site is seeing 3.2 million unique users per month and 45 million video views per month.

In order to draw more vistors, TwitchTV is partnering with video games portals and tournaments to add compelling content to the site. Currently the site features live video game battles and commentary from titles like Halo:Reach, Starcraft II, World Of Warcraft, Call Of Duty: Black Ops and others.

This week, Justin.tv is partering with GameSpot to stream over 90 hours of content from the video game convention E3.

TwitchTV is also featuring a program where gamers and tournaments can share in advertising revenue generated by live video streams. The company is also hoping to monetize through other premium content formats, including pay-per-view videos as well as subscription based models.

Justin.tv’s CEO Michael Seibel says that the company does not plan to move into other verticals in the future but though e-sports was compelling because of the massive userbase around video games on the web. And the startup can tap into a built in set of advertisers.

In terms of competition, TwitchTV will face competition from Own3DTV and Break Media.

Also worth noting is another side project of Justin.tv—Socialcam. Launched a few months ago, Socialcam is sort of an Instagram for video, and provides users with a mobile and web app to share video with friends on Facebook and Twitter.