Justin.tv: One camera broadcast to a website with 35 million users by Dmitry
February 24, 2010 in with 11 Comments
Our last ZURBsoapbox with Justin Kan of Justin.tv was rocking! Justin shared his story of how he came up with the idea of a 24/7 live broadcast, how he became an international celebrity, and the sharp turn Justin.tv had to make to shape the company into the successfully operating business it is today.
You can listen to the entire podcast below or download it on iTunes. Below is a quick summary and highlights from the event.
Google Calendar & the birth of Justin.tv
Back in 2005 Justin Kan and Emmet Shear built Kiko, the first AJAX web calendar. It was hot. Early customers really liked Kiko but right before their launch Google came out with their own calendar which was already integrated with Gmail. Kiko was a YCombinator funded company so Justin and Emmet went to Paul Graham of YCombinator and pitched their next idea: A way to turn your blog into a magazine.
“Ummm. Do you have another idea? ” Paul said.
“Well I thought of a site where I can broadcast myself 24/7 and we can make a reality tv show out of it.”
“Tell me more…” Paul responded.
In 2006 Justin got his seed capital from YCombinator and moved out to San Francisco with Emmet and Mike to start Justin.tv
In the beginning...
A friend at MIT helped out with creating prototype of a laptop in a bag with a camera attached to Justin’s cap. Technology was still a bit unstable but the group consensus was that they’d go ahead with the launch of the site on March 19th, 2007. Now Justin had to do what he promised all along:
“Strap a camera to myself to run around and be interesting for the rest of my life”.
Justin started broadcasting right away. Local news picked it up a week after the launch and the week after that the San Francisco Chronicle contacted Justin to do a story. News sources from around the world followed in following months.
Change of plans
After a little while Justin realized that “I’m not that interesting all the time." People weren't sticking around to watch Justin and, instead, were asking for an ability to broadcast themselves instead.
So the team went back to the drawing board to add this feature to the site. Six months later, in October 2007, Justin Kan turned off his video stream and the “anyone can broadcast” feature went live on the site. Since then they've focused on making it simple and easy for anyone to use live video and broadcast themselves.
We asked Justin a lot of questions during the event, here are some highlights:
What makes it tough to build your product?
"We make decisions based on data now. We log every action on the site and we parse all the data. We know everything that goes on our site. This type of tracking took a long time to build and take a lot of time to monitor and report on. Before we used to make decisions based on team consensus. One good decision we made this was chat. Other features such as groups we probably did not need to spend time and money on. Data driven decisions is an investment but it certainly pays off."
What’s the biggest obstacle in reaching your goals?
"Convince an average person that Justin.tv is an easy to use tool for broadcasting your video. Building an easy channel sharing mechanism – it’s not fun to broadcast yourself when you have no viewers. We’re trying to make it easier to share."
What sets Justin.tv apart from ustream and Livestream?
"We focus on community and lowering the barriers for broadcasting. Livestream and Ustream focus on quality broadcasting for professionals. It’s great but it won’t change the world."
We truly enjoyed Justin's talk—we hope you did too! Be sure to check out the rest of the photos from Justin's ZURBsoapbox on Flickr. See you this friday for the next ZURBsoapbox with Alex Faaborg of Mozilla!
Subscribe to Our Podcast!
Keep up to date with ZURBsoapbox by subscribing to our podcast in two ways:
Highlights from our past ZURBsoapbox lectures are available online at ZURBlog:
- The Cat, The Dog, and Web 2.0 by Mrinal Desai
- Tapping a Vein: Lessons from an iPhone App Startup by Bart Decrem
- Product Excellence Principles by Luke Wroblewski
- Lessons Learned: Technorati to Offbeat Guides by Dave Sifry
- Van Halen, Marriage and Crucial Mistakes by John Marshall
- $250,000 Site Sale on eBay, Killing Goats for 6 Hours, & Healthy "No" by Rich White
11 Comments
Dmitry (ZURB) says:
Once again - real pleasure to have you at our ZURBsoapbox Justin! Truly enjoyed the event!
justin tv says:
hello, i love justin tv, i have a preminium account also.
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