In June Justin.tv launched one of its first verticals, TwitchTV, a live-streamed video game portal and community for gamers. The platform has since taken off in terms of usage, and today, TwitchTV is expanding to the iPhone.
For background, 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. TwitchTV features live video game battles and commentary from titles like Halo:Reach, Starcraft II, World Of Warcraft, Call Of Duty: Black Ops and others.
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Last spring, just in time for SXSW, Justin.tv launched a new standalone video app that has a simple purpose: it lets you share short videos with your friends with just a few taps. The app adopted a model that’s very similar to Instagram’s, with a ‘follow’ system and quick sharing to services like Twitter and Facebook. And it got off to a strong start, with 250,000 downloads in its first month alone.
It’s done so well, in fact, that six months after the app first launched, Justin.tv is spinning Socialcam off as its own independent company.
Justin.tv cofounder and long-time CEO Michael Seibel will become CEO of Socialcam, bringing a small team of Socialcam’s orignal engineers with him. → Read More
Socialcam, the service from Justin.tv that’s essentially an ‘Instagram for Video’, has passed a big milestone: since launching in March, they now have more than one million downloads on iOS devices (actually they have more than that now, because they passed that number in as the end of June). Of those, they say over 335,000 unique active users last month across both their iOS and Android apps, the majority of whom are on iOS — not bad for a service that’s been around for four months.
Today the app is also getting an upgrade. You’ll now find that Socialcam features a new activity feed, which gives you a constantly-updated view of the videos your friends have Liked and commented on.
Another important addition: you can now ‘trim’ videos before you upload them. This is key, say CEO Michael Seibel and President Justin Kan, because oftentimes when users take a video they begin recording in anticipation of something happening — and that the interesting stuff may not come for 10 or 30 seconds after they hit the record button. Now they’ll be able to trim the extra fat before uploading. And the app now includes tap-to-focus. → Read More
While the historical accuracy of Facebook tell-all The Social Network was questionable, the movie did tremendously well at the box office. And at the Golden Globe Awards and the Oscars. Now Hollywood producers are looking for the next big story around a tech company. Next up—Justin.TV.
LA-based production company Riche Productions has bought the rights to the story behind the development and founding of live video streaming startup Justin.TV. For background, the startup was founded by Justin Kan, Michael Seibel, Kyle Vogt and Emmett Shear, who were all buddies from college (Vogt went to MIT, the others graduated from Yale). → Read More
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. → Read More
Socialcam, the video sharing app that was created by Justin.tv, is quickly fleshing out its feature set. The app — which is a lot like an ‘Instagram for video’, minus the effects filters — launched just in time for SXSW and had 250,000 downloads in its first month (the total download number is significantly higher than that, though they aren’t releasing figures until they reach their next ‘big’ milestone). A few weeks ago the company launched a 2.0 release that streamlined the video upload process, and today it’s adding another key feature: a web version of Socialcam.
Now, in a sense Socialcam has had a website since it launched — every time you shared a Socialcam video via email or Twitter, you sent out a link to a landing page with your video embedded. You could retweet or share that page on Facebook, but that was it. There weren’t profile pages, so you couldn’t browse through the other videos your friends had recorded, and you couldn’t see who was tagged in each video (one of Socialcam’s features is a quick way to tag your friends in clips). → Read More
Back in Feburary we took an in-depth look at Socialcam, the mobile video app for iPhone and Android that was built by Justin.tv. The app is easiest to describe as an ‘Instagram for video’ — fire it up and you’ll see a stream of videos recently recorded by your friends. And when you record a video, it’s very easy to quickly tag your friends using Facebook Connect.
Since launching in March (just in time for SXSW), the app has racked up over 250,000 downloads in its first month, 75% of which were on iOS devices. And today they’re launching an update to the app (iPhone only for now, with Android’s update coming) that makes some nice tweaks. I sat down with Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel and President Justin Kan, who walked me through some of changes. You can download the update right here. → Read More
Between the likes of picplz and Instagram, image-sharing sites are making plenty of headlines these days. And there’s one obvious offshoot that seems ripe for similar services: video. Granted, Path offers support for video, but it’s semi-private and there could still be an opportunity for a more public service to tap into this trend.That’s where Justin.tv’s upcoming app Socialcam comes in.
The app, which remains in a very limited beta, is looking to to offer a straightforward way for people to capture and share their videos with friends — and yes, it’s doing that in a way that is very similar to Instagram and picplz, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I sat down with Justin.tv founder Justin Kan and VP of marketing Matthew DiPietro to get a tour of the app, and have also gotten the chance to play around with the Android version myself.
Kan says that it’s frustratingly difficult to share video taken on your phone with friends: email attachments are a pain because of size issues, and MMS leads to heavily degraded video quality. YouTube makes it easy to upload directly from your phone, but the focus there doesn’t seem to be on sharing your clips with a network of friends. → Read More
UFC has continued its fight against copyright infringement by filing a lawsuit against Justin.tv, the video streaming Web site where, UFC alleges, people can watch its events for free. UFC takes issue with “Justin.tv’s repeated and ongoing failure to meaningfully address the rampant and illegal uploading of video of live Pay-Per-View UFC events by members and users of the Justin.tv website.” UFC had previously subpoenaed Justin.tv (and Ustream) for the names of people who had streamed events illegally. → Read More
Justin.tv has been bleeding employees recently. VP of Marketing Evan Soloman, VP of Business Development David Aufhauser (and most of the business development team), and VP of Product Caleb Elston have all left the video streaming startup over the past few weeks. While that sounds like a foreboding number of key hires exiting the company in a short amount of time, CEO Michael Seibel doesn’t seem too worried. “At a glance, the situation looks a lot different than what it really is,” says Seibel. Each employee that left had a distinct and different reason for leaving that had nothing to do with the performance of the startup, says Seibel. For example, Elston got the startup bug, and Aufhauser came on a year ago to forge premium partnerships for livestreams, a strategy that Justin.tv has since shuttered. In fact, the company continues to grow in terms of usage, says Seibel, at a faster rate that ever, especially when it comes to mobile streaming.
According to the company, there has been a 20% increase in total broadcasts overall (both mobile and web) since the launch of Justin.tv’s Android app that broadcasts live video from the mobile phone. A few weeks later, the startup added the same functionality to the iPhone, launching an iPhone app that allows you to broadcast video from the device on Justin.tv. → Read More
It was just over a year ago that Caleb Elston announced he would be leaving Miami and heading to San Francisco to become the VP of Product for Justin.tv. As of today, he’s out to commit himself to his new startup, Yobongo, a stealth startup centered around mobile communications and sharing, we’re told. And Elston is taking a fellow Justin.tv employee with him — David Kasper, a software engineer, will join him as a co-founder.
“Justin.tv has been an amazing place to work and the caliber of peopleis off the charts high, but Yobongo is something I haven’t been ableto get off my mind for a long while now,” Elston writes to us in an email. “It is clear to us that there will be new ways to communicate with people due to the proliferationof smart phones which are both always connected and location aware. We have not seen anything truly new created yet, imagined from the groundup, that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of smartphones,” he continues. → Read More
Time spent watching live video is up 650 percent in the U.S. over the past year, thanks to the proliferation of a number of live video publishers including Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik and Livestream. In particular, Justin.tv has been one of the leaders of the pack, serving more than 300 million live videos per month. And a few weeks ago, the startup launched an Android app for broadcasting live video. Today, Justin.tv has added the same functionality to the iPhone, launching a new iPhone app that allows you to broadcast video from the device on Justin.tv. You can download the free app here.
The biggest change in the new app, is as we wrote above, the ability to broadcast video on Justin.tv directly from your iPhone, which was not included in the previous version of the app, which was view-only. → Read More
comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally—U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web.
While live online video sites don’t have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average online video view. → Read More
When you think about broadcasting live video over the Internet, being tethered to your computer isn’t so much fun. Broadcasting live from your mobile phone, now that starts to get interesting. Today, Justin.tv is joining the mobile party with an Android app for broadcasting live video (which will be available later today). A similar iPhone app is also in the works (it’s current iPhone app is view-only).
While Justin.tv may be a little late to the party, it comes bearing some new gifts. The Android app takes advantage of hardware video encoding, which drains the battery less. It also adjusts the bitrate at which the video is uploaded, depending on the strength of your wireless connection. → Read More
If this were the AP, the following would be the lede to this next story: “UFC President Dana White wants to put pirates in a kimura.” (That, of course, assumed the AP funny lede guy even knows what a kimura is!) Man, those soft ledes are terrible. Moving on… yeah, Dana White is upset at pirates. The promotion has subpoenaed Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, demanding to know the names of people who stream UFC pay-per-view events. → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Seibel is the CEO of Justin.tv, the largest live video site on the Web. In this guest post, he addresses the challenges of live video on the Web and how to set it free (hint: it’s all about mobile).
I spend a lot of time talking about the challenges that live video will face in growing from an intriguing group of startups to an obvious part of the everyday web experience. Nearly everyone assumes that business challenges are what we need to overcome—bandwidth costs, copyright protection, premium content rights or monetization. They are surprised when my answers are product-focused, not business-focused.
Problem 1: Availability. The first evolution of consumer live video creation came in one flavor: broadcast from a computer with a webcam. Unfortunately, the interesting things that happen when you sit in front of your computer screen are few and far between. Being tethered to a computer is the single biggest problem in live video today. People need to be able to create live video from anywhere. → Read More
Justin.tv is finally kicking its mobile plans into high gear. Next week, the lifecasting company will release its Android app to beta users. Unlike its iPhone app (released last month), the Android offering will finally let users stream live video with a simple click and simultaneously chat as they shoot. It’s a simple interface, an image of your shot, a chat bar below and three buttons on the right hand side: chat, record and share. The official version for public consumption is slated for May.
Justin.tv is relatively late to the mobile game— rival Android and iPhone products from Ustream and Qik have been out for months— but the team argues that taking time to refine the products will help them grab more market share later this year. Video demo and interview with founder Justin Kan ahead. → Read More
Video streaming apps on the iPhone in the U.S. have always had to contend with the limitations of AT&T’s data network. For a long time, video streaming apps were not allowed in the App Store. And when they did finally get approved, at first they could only stream videos via WiFi.
As AT&T slowly beefs up its data network, iPhone apps can now deliver streams over 3G. But network availability is still an issue, so much so that Apple is now requiring that video watching apps support multiple streaming bitrates before it will approve an app. At least that was the case for Justin.tv’s iPhone video app, which hit the App Store earlier this week. During the approval process, Justin.tv was asked to incorporate both high-quality (200 kbps) and low-quality (64 kbps) streams. The video switches to a low-quality when the 3G network is overloaded or only the slower EDGE network is available (which renders any video painful to watch no matter what the bitrate). → Read More
Watching live video on your iPhone is nothing new, but it is becoming increasingly easier to do. More than a year after Ustream launched its live video viewing iPhone app, and followed up with a video publishing app, along with Qik and Kyte, Justin.tv is entering the mobile game with its first iPhone app (which should be available shortly in the iTunes store).
Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel says they took their time with the app because they wanted to get it right. “We tried not to cut corners,” he says. All the live videos and channels available on the Website can be watched in the iPhone app. You can find videos by looking at the featured channels or by searching. Videos play horizontally in landscape mode, and text chat is built into the app. The chat text is laid across the bottom of the video and can be tapped on to make it disappear. And the audio works both with or without headphones, which apparently isn’t the case with all other iPhone video apps. → Read More
