“Hundreds of adolescent viewers watched (sort of) as Justin had sex on the show”

???

“The site has been far more successful so far than the founders anticipated.”

By which you mean not successful at all? Traffic is down, there are no sponsors that really generate any revenue, and they got evicted. Hmmm, that’s very successful.

The press buzz has come and gone and they failed to capitalize on it. This is a social site and should have grown if it were to be a big hit. Instead, it’s shrunk.

UStream beat them at their own game and they both realized life casting is not particularly interesting.

There is method to the madness after all. I had gone on and watched as Justin snoozed. I wondered then how long the idea would last but apparently there is a well-structured business plan being rolled out over time…or is there?

There is something simply terrifying about the fact that there are actually a large number of people not only willing to watch this guy, but to emulate him. I am not about to blame the web for this, MTV proved long ago that if you come up with something silly enough you can pretty much guarantee scads of followers.

Either way, lets all hope that the web doesn’t go the way of television a few years back, when you couldn’t find anything interesting on that wasn’t a glorified web-cam.

What defines success? eyeballs? that’s sooooo Web 1.0
Tell me how the this will turn into the Flickr/Google/YouTube?
I watched it for 10 minutes when it first launched…no longer.
I don’t know anyone who does…I do know people who use Flickr, YouTube etc.

I understand Justin’s desire, at his current age, to have his life 24/7 streamed forever, until he dies (as per his own statements)… but there are so many variables in life he has not touched yet, like, getting married, having kids, etc.. etc.. My bet is when this frenzy is over, he will not continue with this project.

- A Niche of a niche …

- basically that describes having your own channel -

- um; at some point they get so small they can’t be monetized

Ahh… UPPERCASE man…. chill Winston, chill….

Yes, I appologize for posting in this area…it’s simply out of frustration. Nick, if you delete me here I would actually appreciate it. Thanks, Mark

Justin has to have one of the most mundane lives I ever seen. He’s boring, his friends are boring. The most exciting thing was the cops getting called to their apt., and that’s only because he was boring the crap out of his viewers. I can’t believe this fool even got laid. Why does TechCrunch always feel the need to over hype the lame and nonexistent. I like all the beta programs that were suppose to be the next Myspace, Facebook, Netvibes, YouTube, iTunes, Google, Flickr, FireFox, killers that never went live.
Justin.TV revolutionizing web 2.0 with over 6 viewers and generous donation of $25 and a six pack of Heineken from Justin’s roommate.

It’s good to see more people streaming live, I’ve really taken to it, I believe more and more companies will make announcements using these tools.

I’ve started a list of all the companies in the live web video space, I anticipate there will be over 2 dozen by end of year.

http://www.web-strategist.com/.....streaming/

The great thing for consumers is the availability of choices. Having multiple players competing to deliver better services is good news for the ecosystem in general. Of course, as an investor in Ustream, I hope that my company is the most successful, but a healthy set of competitors is best for growing the market.

Wait, who here wasn’t aware that justintv was a platform-play from the beginning? They knew/know his life is a snoozer, but are hoping some of these soon_to_be_announced recruits have more compelling lives. It is not an easy task to set-up a real-time, mobile web-cam, and they have been sorting through the HW limitations and kinks to make it easy for those w/o technical skills, but much more interesting lives. They have 150 eyes minimum at one time with very uninteresting content. If, or when, there is someone fascinating to watch, one can imagine the sponsor revenue will emerge. These other “new” tools and features sound like they will add value to the platform they’re creating (the twitter integration makes sense). The differentiator here (form ustream, I believe) is the real-time, mobile-cam and their new streamers’ lives should be relevant to/ take advantage of, such a platform (eg. not people that hang out at home all the time).

There may also be a indirect play by Justin.tv and Ustream.tv at work. Justin.tv and Ustream.tv have brought a lot of press coverage to this idea of live video streaming. And investors have taken notice.

Since Justin’s debut on Mar. 19th. On2’s stock has risen nearly 300% closing yesterday at $3.75.

Justin.tv totally missed the boat. What a waste of bandwidth…

Nick. Oh Nick.

This is crap. How many times are you going to cover this company? People obviously don’t give a f*ck. Worth one mention, MAYBE. But 4 in the last 2 months? You have to be kidding (or just good friends with Justin).

Never been a big fan myself, always found it pretty boring. Not as funny as something you would see on MTV or any network out there. I think it’s probably a bad sign if they are going to branch out to include a service where others can stream their own videos. I think it shows their own show doesn’t have it’s own two legs to stand on.

Good luck to them though! Hopefully they find success.

At least Justin is taking a chance here. Putting your life on camera at least makes him a little interesting (even if we aren’t sure he really got laid). Come meet him for yourself on Friday May 25th. I am hosting a Free happy hour with Justin.TV at DragonBar - 473 Broadway SF — 6-9pm. RSVP Here

Hope to see you all there

Cheers!

RSVP fot the happy hour here

Events coverage is one way that I think live video has a lot of potential. I don’t know who I would want to watch 24/7 but there’s no shortage of live video I do want to watch. Had a great time watching Zooomr launch discussion yesterday and I just watched the CEO of Cisco give a talk on Cisco Island in Second Life - streamed live on UStream. That was good.

Interesting. I heard about this site http://www.socialepisodes.com that’s supposed to launch this summer. Their angle is to allow a community to build tv shows/episodes collaboratively. Ex: People pitch ideas for new shows and others vote to green light or red light them. Once green lighted, the community pitches and votes on ideas for subsequent episodes. Then everyone goes and films their own version of each episode storyline (imagine if Mel Brooks directed Jaws). Sort of like a community-based choose-your-own adventure.

Seriously, is YC paying you to cover this crap? This “startup” is nonsense. Wake up! Look at the numbers! After all that national TV & press coverage, they have LESS viewers now than before the PR blitz.

The only way for any healthy, longterm viewership is including sex. It’ll evolve into justin.xxx. I’m looking forward to justin.xxx/granny69

idiots…you dont like it so nobody else will? Ian, look at the facts. I could give a shit about this or any YC crap, but should show respect to the facts as they have been stated since day 1 (i actually read it). Marshal, imagine this…you are not the target audience (maybe you are for ustream, but most people are more shallow, in general).

Do you all know what kind of crap people find interesting? Look at google’s “hot trends”. Anything oprah talks about is gold. You people that nay-say but don’t cite specific facts, and seem to use misinformation from which to draw conclusions, have no credibility when you intentionally avoid fact. These guys could die tomorrow and I could give shit, but questioning the legitimacy without backing it up and addressing the actual business plan’s flaws isn’t constructive.

Nick is friends with Justin. There’s clear bias but that exists in other areas as well. It’s just that much more obvious with Justin.tv because we see Justin mentioning how he’s friends with Nick.

bdb - you’re missing the point. A platform play needs some compelling content to get the platform going. Justin Kan is not interesting and anyone who is interesting will have their own show.

Lifecasting isn’t like online video. Lifecasting is branded around the individual much more so than lonelygirl15 or anyone else on YouTube because it’s more than just a snippet of content. Why would anyone famous or interesting be justin.tv/parishilton - that won’t happen. It will be parishilton.tv or something like that. Justin.tv might make a penny or two in the hardware assembly business but they need to get rid of the Yale grads and set up shop in Guangdong first.

Again, TechCrunch misses the point. Justin.tv wasn’t DOA but blew all their publicity and now Nick is shilling for his own friends.

Now for the view outside the valley, I’ve never met anyone who has heard of justin.tv

Rick, exactly. This show doesn’t have much scalability. And as soon as the valley moves on to something else Justin.tv is over.

Forget about the personality. Forget about the hardware.

This is an interesting feature story about four young 23-year-olds trying to figure their lives out. That makes justin.tv interesting (for a minute or two a couple times every few days) to me.

But then - I could be the grandfather of these guys and that does make it fun to watch thanks to my two grandsons (both younger than Justin and crew) who may someday do something similar.

I wish you good luck, Justin, Emmett, Kyle, and Michael.

Clemente Hernandez

ok jay, I missed the point (again). Since you are admittedly technical, and this is an easy technical problem, I expect you to have a mobile stream of your life on your site by Sat. Nothing fancy, you can even use meebo for your chat-room function. There doesn’t even have to be any other features, just live video, in real-time, of you moving beyond the confines of your home.

Can’t someone set-up a pool for all these start-ups with questionable business plans? Sounds like I could get 10:1 on this one.

Technically there is no challenge here… You can do the whole thing with flash and flash media server (flash media server is free for 10 connections). Write a little script to capture the camera and a simple flash player. All with elementary flash action script. Then, all you need is an internet connection. Done! You’re streaming like a porn star. There is nothing magic in what they are doing. No innovation.

They just need to decide if they want to provide content or streaming service. I think they can’t decide. If they want to provide content they are not doing very well. All you see is this guy sleeping until 10 am, drinking, sitting in front of a laptop, drinking, sleeping until 10 am, sit in front of a laptop… etc (BTW, when I worked at a startup I worked way more hours than this guy). They need to put some personalities, characters, conflict to it. Obviously justin doesn’t have a personality. Go do stories, get a press pass, investigate, follow around Gavin Newsom, ride along with the cops, travel and show users what to see, go to iraq and get embedded with the soldiers… For god sakes… do something mildly interesting and entertaining… There are so many ways of providing good quality content that can be entertaining and educational to users. If he likes to be a geek, review products on his show… Attack the many available demographics… They need to spin this around… it’s getting a bit old. They need to up their viewership to get the advertisers and make the real money. If just they had good content they could have advertised while they were getting good press….

And ff they want to be a streaming provider, they need to get their sh*t together. The competition is strong and way better than what they have. Adding “tips”, or voting is not an innovation that will subdue the others….

Let’s see how they turn out. I hope they end with success.

So my URL would be justin.tv/kevin

.. that isn’t confusing at all….

why does TC help this crap everytime it hit bottom on alexa? you will definitely see a spike again tomorrow.

I’m not sure if this is a problem relating to Justin.tv’s international bandwidth, but (as an Irish user), with 3meg (effective 2.4meg download) DSL, I’ve never - not once, having tried on repeated occasions - been able to get Justin.tv to stream for more than about five seconds without stopping for a lengthy buffer, or stuttering unwatchably. This includes replaying past streams. It’s also something I run into with Ustream.

It’s also worth noting that neither service can be accessed through many corporate and educational firewalls (like those in my college). Possibly because of the blockage of UDP traffic.

This is the same old stuff done many times before, CollegeBoysLive.tv and others has basically been doing this for ages,

I too would like to know how you define “success.” There’s no doubt that Justin.tv has achieved some quality press coverage, but from what I can tell, the actual viewership of Justin.tv is not all that impressive, and certainly not high enough to warrant major advertisers/sponsors, which he obviously hasn’t attracted. I wonder how many people who saw him on the Today Show actually tuned in, and of those, how many actually became regular viewers.

The biggest problem for Justin, and anybody else that wants to stream his or her life, is the fact that most people do not lead lives that are interesting to 99.9% of mainstream America. As John said, Justin’s life is mundane, and the average American has no interest in watching a Yale graduate who sits around with technology geeks all day, living off investor money. As sad as it may be, the entertainment that works best typically involves celebrities, athletes, models, materialism and sex. Justin is quite lacking in all those areas. Drama, glamour and gossip sell; lunches with 20-somethings who are brainstorming concepts that they can get VC funding for doesn’t sell. Following the lives of types of the people and storylines that Americans care about and find interesting has already been done with reality TV programming.

Jason, yes but with EVDO it must mean there’s a 30 million dollar acquisition in there.

Honestly, I want to make One Up Calacanis Cast, where I go buy a Corvette and Justin.tv it around town getting into heinous amounts of trouble. Beats 40 minutes of desk-on-camera time.

But then again, I’m a belligerant new media a-hole, and it works for me.

bdb: As for this being a platform play, it’s not a horrible concept, but outside of the fact that there is no defensible technology here and competition is growing, the real problem is that 99.9% of the people who use the platform to stream their lives will be just as mundane as Justin. It will be no different than the user-generated content on YouTube: there will be a few morsels of quality and a ton of junk.

Everybody in Web 2.0 loves to talk about advertising and sponsorship but few seem to recognize that to cut meaningful advertising and sponsorship deals (i.e. the type that would make it worthwhile to walk around with a camera on your head all day), you need to have a large audience. Contrary to how it sometimes appears, advertisers and sponsors are not looking to spend money and get nothing in return. When you look at something like Justin.tv, I think it’d be hard to argue that a major advertiser or sponsor would receive any tangible return from being involved. Justin doesn’t have a large audience, and his lifestyle doesn’t align very well with the image most brands would find makes their brand appealing to mainstream consumers.

That said, I’m sure a few talented people will be discovered through services like this. And guess what will happen? Hollywood will scoop them up. It’s already happening on YouTube and Michael posted earlier about the CBS acquisition of WallStrip. The rest of the wannabe entertainers will, at best, have to be satisfied that they had 15 minutes of fame in front of a few viewers (if not 0 viewers). The truth is that not everybody is talented and not everybody is going to be a star. From a pure sociological standpoint, society would probably benefit if more people were more realistic about this. User-generated content has its place, but I don’t have any problem saying that the hype around it probably both due to and contributing to an increasingly narcissistic culture.

That said, user-generated content isn’t all bad. It’s here to stay but I think that the people who aren’t insulated from all the hype in Silicon Valley don’t fully comprehend that professional content isn’t going anywhere and still accounts for the majority of the video content consumed by mainstream viewers. They don’t understand that the cost of producing quality content will never drop to $0, even if the powerful tools technology provides for content creation are cheap.

A lot of technology people fail to realize that there’s a huge difference between content distribution and content creation. There is no doubt that technology is having a huge impact on distribution, but I get the feeling that far too many “geeks” now believe that because they’ve developed new ways of distributing content, they know the entire entertainment business better than the people who actually run it. Technology has very little to do with creating compelling entertainment. Entertainment has alwas been, and will always be, about storytelling. The distribution channels will always be changing, but if you don’t have an interesting story to tell, you have nothing worth distributing.

Justin.TV? Didn’t that come out already? It was called “The Truman Show” and then “EdTV”. The difference — those endeavors generated money. Justin still gets a weekly allowance from mom and dad.

Enough!

Nick — please show some semblance of journalistic integrity!

Nick Gonzales shows that TechCrunch really isn’t ready for the big leagues. Imagine if the Wall Street Journal published articles about new releases for companies just because they were friends with the executives.

Sad stuff Nick. Really sad given that at the time you posted the article, the new site wasn’t even live.

Michael Arrington - when is Nick Gonzales getting fired for blatantly advertising Justin.tv and writing totally worthless articles on TechCrunch?

I’m calling it. It’s time for Nick Gonzales to resign.

Very sad story. This guy really needs to get laid. And so do his viewers (and reviewers).

Lets continue to discuss how boring justin’s life is because that is obviously relevant when the goal is a platform play, huh?

“…outside of the fact that there is no defensible technology here and competition is growing”
>’Cause myspace was new and original and based on cutting edge technology.

“That said, I’m sure a few talented people will be discovered through services like this. And guess what will happen? Hollywood will scoop them up.”
>Yeah, please back that one up with more than “look at Wallstrip”. It will only take 1 or 2 people.

“A lot of technology people fail to realize that there’s a huge difference between content distribution and content creation. ”
> Good point, they could use a whole lot of help with distribution. Ideally, that would involve deals with tivo, wii/opera, xboxlive, sonyPS, appletv, comcast, directv, and dishnetwork.

BTW, I am a chemist living 1k+ miles from “the valley” and have no idea why i’m defending this idea.

How can this be a platform? Platform is something you can develop, extend, and customize upon. It’s maybe closer to a streaming or livecast portal….

Now let’s split hairs on the use of the term “platform”, very constructive. And since you’ve provided a silly how-to for setting up a “live” cam in your bedroom, please elaborate to include incorporation with cellular data networks.

bdb:

“Cause myspace was new and original and based on cutting edge technology.”

If you’re familiar with how MySpace got started, its parent company, Intermix, owned a number of properties with significant traffic and large email lists, which were leveraged to promote MySpace. Furthermore, MySpace got into the game early on. This is 2007, not 2003. The market has changed. At the time MySpace launched, Friendster was a dominant player but it stumbled and MySpace took advantage of it. The playing field was much more limited then. Try launching a social network today. Because the MySpaces of the world have already established dominant positions, comparing the market today to the market in 2003 is an apples to oranges comparison.

“Yeah, please back that one up with more than “look at Wallstrip”. It will only take 1 or 2 people.”

thugonline.ulmb.com/?p=227
digitaltv-weblog.com/50226711/talent_agency_is_aiming_to_find_web_video_stars.php
latimes.com/technology/la-fi-loca18may18,1,6158047.story
broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6412301.html
mashable.com/2006/09/27/youtube-stars-land-tv-deal/
mashable.com/2007/02/11/youtube-to-tv-myspace-movie-creator-jumps/

I think this more than validates the fact that Hollywood is using services like YouTube to find new talent, and that talent is more than willing to “sell out” for Hollywood deals.

“Good point, they could use a whole lot of help with distribution. Ideally, that would involve deals with tivo, wii/opera, xboxlive, sonyPS, appletv, comcast, directv, and dishnetwork.”

I think you missed my point. What I am saying is that technology people should stick to innovating distribution channels and leave the content creation to the pros. Justin.tv doesn’t need any help with distribution because he doesn’t have any content that’s worth distributing! Entities like Comcast and DirecTV are unlikely to have any interest in distributing Justin.tv because he’s not a character that has a whole lot of mainstream appeal and the way he spends his time is hardly exciting. At a very basic level, the question a network has to ask when pitched an idea is: will this attact an audience that I can sell enough advertising against to be profitable? Given the fact that Justin.tv has received ample mainstream press but still only has a small, niche audience, I think it’s safe to say that his lack of appeal has been established.

bdb, There is not much elaborate here? It’s all IP network.
Get a data plan with your favorite cell provider. Get a 3G PCMCIA card or an EVDO PCMCIA card (depending on your cell network). Install it on your laptop and get connected to the network/internet. Load up your little streaming flash client. The client will capture your camera stream through USB (flash provides simple API for this, even in controlling the compression) and stream it using rtmp (Real Time Messaging Protocol) to your flash media server. Set it to “live” mode and your choice of quality…

Then on the client you just need to point your written flash video player client to the rtmp or (rtmpt for http tunneling, since firewalls/SPI will deny port 1935 TCP packets) of the live file stream at your flash media server. You should measure the bandwidth of the client and buffer/stream appropriately. Emmbed the client to an html on a web server, you’re done. And it’s cross platform too…. all browsers have flash plug-ins, even my cell phone has a flash player…

So to re-iterate:

1. Justin.tv has no valuable content - because Justin Kan is boring as are his little Y Combinator geeky buddies.

2. Justin.tv has no defensible technology - because Tom just told us how to do it.

3. Justin.tv got lots of press and has next to nothing to show for it - because it has no stickiness.

4. Y Combinator lays another egg. Guess that’s not news anymore.

5. TechCrunch is going downhill. Not news either.

Go to market strategy was way off for this, and I think it confused many people (many here seem to really think justin’s life was supposed to be the sticky content worthy of sponsorship and distribution deal…oops). Even worse, justin.tv might be the worst brand-name ever used.

justin.tv hasn’t put out any REAL content yet, and that could change if the right person came along. I can’t believe the #uniques with such boring content, it makes no sense to me.

I (non-IT-technical) have had to help 4 different friends set their EVDO Expresscards up just for IP access. What tom (thank you!) wrote would cause them to cross their eyes and pass out; I would have to spend a few days with it researching and experimenting.

Real time, MOBILE streaming is not that common. Maybe I should look, but it hasn’t rolled across my radar from anywhere else.

I’ll eat my words when the time comes….

You guys are just haters because he’s young and calls his own shots. Might be boring but even real rockstars have boring moments. I don’t watch Justin.tv but I appreciate what he’s doing. Shut up and do something better.

at least JenniCam had a chick. what is the big deal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam

this is so very 1996, i’m stumped.

obviously “Justin will wear the camera until the day he dies. By which we mean if he takes it off, we’ll kill him.” was a lie. we all knew it was.

but i absolutely despise publicity written that way just for eyeballs. 20 years from now i should ask justin’s current partners why he isn’t dead yet.

Lifecasting is going to be huge.

Justin.tv will become the future platform for lifecasting [live video blogging-even if not 24/7 ]. Due to the non-anomymous nature of lifecasting, this platform will become a very reliable source of everything internetish …This is huge people.

Back when blogger was launched, no one cared. And now..

This is the next big thing. If human beings dont mind spending hours and hours on Digg without any monetary benefit, then anything is possible.