Justin.tv’s social video bet pays off with 150K downloads

March 21, 2011 6:46 PM
Anthony Ha
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Justin.tv, one of the best-known startups offering live-streaming video services, launched a mobile video application called Socialcam two weeks ago that moved the company in a new direction. The app seems to be attracting users — it has been downloaded more than 150,000 times.

When I talked to Justin.tv spokesman Matthew DiPietro right before the Socialcam launch, he told me the company was applying some of the lessons it had learned from adding livestreaming to the Justin.tv mobile app to the new service. One lesson was that users care a lot more about video quality and the app’s social components than they do about whether or not the video is live, he said. So the goal of Socialcam is to make it super-easy to upload videos from your phone, then share them on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.

Apparently, Socialcam was downloaded more than 50,000 times in its first few days alone. Although it’s available on both iPhone and Android, the vast majority of early users are on iPhones, as you can see in the chart below. (Socialcam has been compared to photo-sharing application Instagram, which reportedly hit 2 million registered users in four months despite only being available on the iPhone.)

By comparison, the existing Justin.tv app has been downloaded more than 4 million times. When I asked DiPietro today whether Socialcam might eventually eclipse the company’s old app, he said:

With Socialcam, we believe strongly that we’ve created something that people will use, and that we’ve solved a problem that was keeping people from sharing video as a part of their everyday mobile and social media habits. The potential is gigantic. The numbers so far are very encouraging, but of course only time will tell.

The San Francisco startup is backed by Alsop Louie Partners, Tim Draper, and incubator Y Combinator.

socialcam infographic

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  • yoannvalensi

    That's interesting to see that even though Android has become the number 1 plateform in the US, numbers of download are always significantely bigget pn the App Store, even when the product is avilable on both plateform.Is it going to change as Android users are not yet used to downloading apps or is it just that customers are still very different. Also, the android market needs to be completely reviewed. The UI is terrible

  • http://twitter.com/mrmacgregor Mr. MacGregor

    You know what's really great about Justin tv? All those pedophiles on the site sexually harassing underage kids. JTV will ban the kids when it gets to be too much, but doesn't ban the pedos. Why is that? Doesn't make any sense. Speaking of the underage kids, isn't it also great that JTV markets it's site towards kids and allows 13 year olds to cast on the site but also have Trojan condom ads show up in randomly in channels. Great, wholesome, family entertainment there. But do you want REAL family entertainment? How about the porn channels that reach the top of the social section before one of the lazy admins decide to remove it after 5,000 or so views. Speaking of those lazy admins, they're usually too busy watching an illegal stream of copyrighted content in the Entertainment section, such as Tyster_DS camping out in NCIS or Criminal Minds channels that have been removed by the copyright holder many times befores. Another admin by the name of Saffire, age near 40, was caught talking to 15 and 16 year olds about masterbation in a Skype chat. Real classy for an admin on a site filled with kids to be doing that. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the gist of it. Or is that jizz? As in Justin tv is the jizz of the internet.

  • Brandenlee

    The Terms of Service on Justin.tv is a Joke.1. EligibilityThe Justin.tv Service is not available to persons under the age of 13 or to any users previously suspended or removed from the Justin.tv Service by Justin.tv.All lies. You will find dozens of broadcasting returning while the worthless and useless admins do nothing to ban them until one of their puppies tell them they were banned before. Reports do nothing. Because Justin.tv do not monitor the social directory for violations. You will find underage kids, porn and guys fapping the meat run for a long time before the monkey admins see find out. Lately, you will find video clips of parents giving their babies and little kids baths NAKED. Seriously, on a family site full of pedophiles running free, who posts videos of their children in this way. And the admins do nothing to ban these channel, instead they go private. On top of this, if you report some channels that break the terms of service, you will get banned. Some channels are protected from getting reported and banned. Full of corruption on that website.

  • chocoroco

    Shame on the author of this article for singing the praises of a website that is a pedo haven. As pointed out by previous commenters.

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    [...] to an email, Michael Seibel, the CEO of Justin.tv (which recently released a mobile video-sharing app called Socialcam), seemed less convinced that tiered data will lead to any big [...]

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