Justin.tv unlikely to be duplicated

May 22, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

justintv1.jpgJustin.tv, the non-stop TV show featuring an extremely popular webcam of a guy named Justin in San Francisco (see it in action below), is unveiling a network to allow other people to do the same thing.

The technology required to stream video of your life to large numbers of viewers, while you are constantly on the go, for example in a car, is not as easy as it looks, and Justin.tv has gotten a reputation of doing it well.

The show is trying to become a company (in Silicon Valley, you can’t stay small and frivolous without people wondering what is wrong with you), and so a network is one way to do this. It will offer people a vanity URL (http://justin.tv/name) and the staples featured on Justin’s page, such as a chat room, calendar, clip archives and so on. Techcrunch has the details here. These features are certainly nifty, when compared to most off-the-shelf video tools offered by YouTube and chat/networking sites. Yet another company, Ustream.tv, has recently popped up to do something similar.

Justin.tv got previous funding from YCombinator. It has benefited from hype and entered bubble territory more than most companies. The other problem with a network is that anyone shooting 24/7 cams of themselves are unlikely to want to fork over any ad revenue they earn to Justin.tv. Few people are likely to spark with viewers as well as Justin.

Even this evening, the future of Justin.tv was being debated at the site itself:

justintv.jpg

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Ustream.tv will ultimately win out. It has a better interface and design. Plus it is open to anyone while Justin.tv allows streamers by invite only.
  • ustream.tv is cranky when it has more than 100 viewers, case in point when thomas hawk and kristopher tate had it on for their zooomr mark III launch:
    http://ustream.tv/channel/zooomr-mark-iii-launch

    I think stickam.com is better right now.

    I'd like to be able to duplicate their ability to broadcast over cellular networks.
  • anyone want to place a wager on who dies first, ustream.tv or justin.tv? I bet ustream is the first to go.