Before livestreaming video networks like Justin.TV can become attractive to advertisers, they need to deal with their piracy issues. It’s the same thing YouTube had to go through, except with live video streams. Like YouTube, Justin.tv complies with DMCA takedown notices and is developing digital fingerprinting technology to identify copyrighted video on its network automatically. It also invites copyright owners to police the site directly.
Despite these measures, a casual perusal of the most popular streams on Justin.tv is filled with pirated streams of professional sports, TV shows, and movies. Right now, for instance, you can watch King of Queens or CNN International, taken straight from TV. The company finds itself increasingly under fire for copyright issues. To help it deal with these issues, Justin.tv now has a new adviser, Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clare University and a highly-respected Internet law blogger. Unlike Justin.TV’s very-expensive lawyers at Wilson Sonsini, Goldman will be less constrained in speaking publicly on behalf of the company about these issues. Goldman is an expert on how copyright law is applied to user-generated content. But in many ways live video on the Web is a new beast. → Read More
Many social networks these days offer some sort of instant messaging chatting element. The problem is that people are already chatting on a half dozen other services throughout the day. Justin.tv is launching a way to tie some of the big ones together on its site.
Its new unified chat option launching today allows users to pull their Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter conversations into Justin.tv. These are then all displayed in a single chat window that resides on the right hand side of the page. → Read More
Justin.tv, one of the most popular live webcasting services on the net, will be testifying in a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning. The topic of the hearing: the future of live online sports broadcasting.
We got hold of the startup’s written and oral testimony, which Justin.tv hopes will be enough to convince the Committee that the nature of live video broadcasting makes it impossible for them to avoid copyrighted content from ending up on the site, whether it’s live sports or other content like TV shows. → Read More
This past weekend, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone spoke at Startup School. Before they took the stage, they met up with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and came up with a great idea: A deal to ensure that Y Combinator startups working on Twitter-related projects have priority access to the tweet stream, as well as access to Twitter’s team.
The idea led Graham to delay the application deadline for YC Winter 2010 startups for two days, so they could release two new Requests For Startups (RFS), YC’s recently announced program that gives applicants basic big picture ideas from which to form startups around. One of these new RFSes is obviously to build something on top of Twitter. Here’s the description: → Read More
“Archive video has clearly exploded all over the internet, but live video hasn’t. We think it’s because more flexibility is needed that no single product can meet, but an open platform can.” That’s what Justin.tv VP of Marketing Evan Solomon tells us in announcing the opening up of the service’s API.
The API, which has been in closed testing for about a month now, will now be available to anyone who wishes to use it, for free. Justin.tv can do this because they’ve made live video cheap to serve. Their internal network has capacity for some 100 million hours of video viewing per month, we’re told. For some perspective, that’s roughly 2.5% of media giant Comcast’s capacity, but Justin.tv is run at a fraction of the cost. → Read More
Ten days ago at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Justin.tv demonstrated a new beta product they are working on called CamTweet. It lets you launch a live video broadcast using your computer Webcam, Tweet it out to your followers on Twitter with a link to help gather an audience, and then keep the viral Tweets going by letting the audience sign into a chat box with their Twitter accounts so that each comment gets Tweeted out to their followers with a link back to the video.
It is a really simple, but powerful idea. So simple, in fact, that one of Justin.TV’s competitors, Livestream CEO Max Haot (who was watching the demo from New York via UStream, another live Web video competitor) decided to create the exact same product using Livestream’s new, yet-to-be released APIs. → Read More
There’s a lot of live video streaming competition out there right now, but Justin.tv remains the biggest. And it’s looking to hold that lead with a redesign launching today, along with some new features.
The new site has an overall cleaner and simplified look. And simplification is the key to another big change: The addition of big front page broadcaster. When you first load up the site you will see front and center a large video player with the phrase “Live broadcasting in one click.” If you click on the big red button below it, you’ll load up your camera options screen, where you pick a camera to record from. From there you can log-in or create an account to start broadcasting. → Read More
There are a few ways you can send out live video feeds over Twitter right now. The most obvious is just take a service like Justin.tv, shorten your live stream URL, and tweet it out. But there’s no real easy-to-use seamless way of doing it. That’s what Camtweet, a new side project of Justin.tv launching today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, wants to be.
Camtweet looks kind of like what the various photo and video sharing sites that are tied to Twitter currently look like, except it has a big live video box in the center. Below that is the place where you chat to others who are watching in your Camtweet (or Justin.tv — the videos will reside on both) room. And these messages are tweeted out with a link to bring people back to the room. Then when they login with their Twitter credentials and chat with you on the page, their messages are tweeted out too. → Read More
The thing that saved television watching for me was the advent of the digital video recorder (DVR). I love the idea that you can be watching something, but have to stop to do something else, so you just pause it, and it will record it so you can come back later and pick up where you left off. Now you can have the same functionality on the live-streaming video site, Justin.tv.
While most live-streaming services offer archives of live recorded video, the nice feature here is the simple way to pick up just where you left off watching something. The feature, rolling out his afternoon, will offer a bar under each video that will read, “Continue watching this later.” If you click on it, all that live video will be recorded so that you can come back to it at a time of your choosing. You’ll receive a link to a place to come back and watch it with a message that looks like: → Read More
Live video on the Web is starting to take off, judging by the massive jump in traffic that Justin.tv is witnessing. According to comScore, the live video site’s global audience saw a massive jump from 9.3 million unique visitors in January to 15 million in February, which is about the same number of people who went to Veoh and nearly twice as many as visited Hulu.com. Of course, Hulu is only available in the U.S., where it is fourth most popular video site, and its videos are watched on other sites as well. In the U.S., ComScore only shows Justin.tv attracting 1.4 million people in February. So most of its audience and growth is global, with particular strength in Spain, Brazil, Germany, and the UK.
Quantcast, which directly measures all three sites, shows a similar trend. Globally, Justin.tv has 22.1 million monthly uniques, compared to 15.8 million for Hulu, and 11.9 million for Veoh. While the U.S. numbers are 3.9 million for Justin.tv, 14 million for Hulu, and 4 million for Veoh. (Ustream.tv seems to be the second-largest live video streaming site with 6.7 million global monthly visitors and 1.4 million in the U.S.). These are all site numbers, Quantcast also measures “network” numbers which presumably includes videos embedded elsewhere, and those are about double the site stats for each service. Justin.tv itself claims 1,800 percent year-over-year growth in unique visitors based on its internal Google Analytics numbers. → Read More
In the down economy, startups are trying everything they can think of to keep a steady flow of revenue coming in. For popular live-streaming video site Justin.tv, it looks like one of these measures is to try to capitalize on its users’ frequent searches for porn: if you run queries for terms like “xxx” or “sex”, the site will automatically redirect you to a third-party pornography page.
Before users are redirected, they’re presented with a message for five seconds indicating that while Justin.tv has banned adult content, the site is sending them to “a site where you can find what you’re looking for”. The new “feature” may be flying under the banner of convenience, but the site is clearly looking for a new source of income. Justin.tv may well be having trouble coping in the current economy, and a porn affiliate pays far more than a blank search results page.
I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with what Justin.tv is doing – it’s highly unlikely anyone is going to accidentally search the site for “xxx” and get offended when they’re sent to a porn site (though they might get annoyed). But the new ‘feature’ doesn’t gel with much of the content on the site, which features clips of puppies and video games on its home page. And the site should really include a page confirming that the user is over 18 before redirecting them (there seems to be no such confirmation found on at least some of the redirected porn sites). → Read More
Let’s revisit a topic that we addressed several months ago: illicit online streaming of television broadcasts, namely sports. This is different from going to the Pirate Bay a few hours after a show airs and downloading a file. We’re talking about, hey, the big game’s on, let’s go to justin.tv or ustream to watch it. → Read More
Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive – you have to license Adobe’s Flash Media Server, or a competitor like Wowza, and pay at least a couple of cents per gigabyte transferred on top of normal costs.
We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services – Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV. And in fact Google has met with all of those startups to discuss partnerships or an outright acquisition.
But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai. Google won’t confirm this, but it’s fairly trivial to detect (see screen shot below). Why did they go with Akamai instead of partnering? One key factor may be that Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.tv haven’t streamed live events with much more than 100,000 simultaneous viewers (correction: one person associated with Justin.tv emails to say they’ve hit “well over 400,000″), so tonight’s concert would have been an experiment in scalability for them. → Read More
Justin.tv, one of the first live video streaming sites, has announced its 1 millionth registered user since its launch in March 2007. Justin.tv has a number competitors, namely Stickam, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv, but has managed to keep a strong presence in the space (maintaining attention along the way with a number of media stunts). We’ve analyzed the competition several times. In March we took a look at Justin.tv’s growth through its first year of operation. In that post, we included user and data statistics until that point, and we’ve included a similar set today: 1,721,868 friendships made 90,690 channels created 522,794 favorited channels 95,253 video highlights saved 29,167 playlists generated 24,478 events broadcasted 61,562 video clips uploaded to youtube 62,278 twitter messages sent 16,294 myspace bulletins sent 119 years of video broadcasted & archived Justin.tv has seen explosive growth since March, gaining 650,000 new users and the equivalent of 62 more years of video to be exact. Below is a chart that represents their growth in weekly new registered users for the past year. CrunchBase Information Justin.TV Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
CrunchBase Information Justin.TV Ustream Stickam Mogulus Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Ha! This modern age. Vlogging and lifecasting (shudder) site Justin.tv user Chowda633 went off to get ear surgery a while ago and returned to find several vital items missing from his apartment. Fortunately for him, his Justin.tv stream was going the whole time he was gone, and another user found the footage of the robbery. It’s not really that exciting to watch, of course, but the event itself is great. Anyone else know of any good stories where robberies, cheating spouses, or alien visitors have been caught by a webcam? → Read More
Every once in a while some great real-life drama comes out of lifecasting site Justin.tv (you just have to sift through thousands of hours of footage to find it). A year ago the police raided the Justin.tv offices/house, guns drawn, for example (I wonder what happened to that video?). More recently, blogger/lifecaster Ronald Lewis was caught being a jerk to a random movie theater employee that objected to him bringing his camera into a movie. Now, a user named Chowda633 manages to accidentally catch his neighbor robbing his apartment. More details on the Justin.tv blog. I guess this proves that if you point a camera at anything long enough, something interesting might happen. http://www.justin.tv/widgets/jtv_tip_embed.swfWatch live video from chowda633′s channel on Justin.tv CrunchBase Information Justin.TV Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Very few would argue with the statement that video is hot right now. From the cultural phenomenon of YouTube, through to the rise of live streaming services, money is pouring into startups from content creators through to service providers. Getting into video isn’t as easy as setting up a blog, so here’s some advice of which direction to head in. The basics Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing. Recording You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (between $30-$45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube. Streaming Live Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. → Read More
Ustream.TV has taken $11.1 million Series A in a round that included Doll Capital Management and existing investor The Band of Angels. Ustream.TV was in the first wave of live broadcast sites that launched in 2007 along with Justin.TV, BlogTV and Mogulus. Ustream.TV took $2 million in angel funding in December and appointed General Wesley Clark to the board. Rumors surface in January that the company was in takeover talks with Microsoft with a $50 million price tag. Ustream.TV has grown from its original launch to become a broadcast hub for Presidential hopefuls, popular entertainers and musicians, technology industry gurus and business executives. The live broadcasting service has been complemented with a depth of tools that allows people like Chris Pirillo to build a video empire. Ustream.TV offers video conversion and download in .FLV, .WMV, .MP4 and .MOV, and users can syndicate videos created from live shows on video sites such as Blip.tv. According to Ustream.TV, their traffic has grown 325% over the last 6 months. Ustream.TV said the funding would be used to accelerate product development and “meet market demand for a live online video broadcasting platform that allows people all over the world to engage in real-time.” CrunchBase Information Ustream Justin.TV Mogulus blogTV Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It’s been a whole year since the launch of live video streaming site Justin.TV , and there is no shortage of competitors (Ustream, BlogTV, Kyte, Stickam, Mogulus, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo). (See more of our coverage here). But Justin.TV looks like it is holding its own in this still-nascent part of the Web. “So far,,” notes CEO Michael Seibel, “Justin.tv has more than 50 years of video stored in its archives and we have accumulated 10 of those years over the past 30 days.” Here are some more stats provided by the company, both cumulative for the past year and for the past 30 days: 1 Year Statistics: * 87,331,037 pageviews * 24,954,403 unique visitors * 57 years of archives * 28,106 total channels * 356,197 registered users * 73,754 user created video clips Last 30 day stats * 21,409,755 pageviews * 5,963,775 uniques * 11 years of archives * 6,954 new channels * 73,534 registered users * 26,500 user created video clips Peaks: * 3.6 gbps video * 32,000 simultaneous viewers Update 2: Justin.TV reviewed its stats, and believes that its website analytics software, StatCounter, overcounts unique visitors. So it has provided the following data from Google Analytics, which vastly diminishes its unique visitor count in the past 30 days from 6 million to 1.6 million. This is really lame, but at least they fessed up. And this is why I always try to go with comScore—better to undercount than overcount. 1 Year Statistics: 85,335,630 pageviews 4,823,411 absolute unique visitors Last 30 day stats: 21,859,147 pageviews 1,560,112 absolute unique visitors Update: Here is a graph from Justin.TV, of only its site’s pageviews, unique visitors, and returning visitors (worldwide): Here are the comScore stats for the site alone. (Justin.TV is the red line). Note that these tell a very different story, with only 293,000 uniques in February (compared to the 6 million—(update) make that 1.6 million— claimed by the company). These are all U.S. stats, but the trends roughly match the worldwide stats from comScore as well. I present them here only to give a sense of how it is doing as a destination site versus some of its competitors. (Here is Alexa and Compete). As a destination site, it looks to be doing better than UStream and BlogTV: But not quite as well as Kyte.TV or StickCam (although the numbers are so low for all of these sites, that it → Read More
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