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’sPaul 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:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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 severaltimes.
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.
Who is winning the race to become the top site for live Web video? A quick check on Google Trends for Websites and comScore suggests that over the past four months Justin.tv is pulling ahead of the pack. According to Google Trends, Justin.tv is attracting more than 300,000 unique visitors a day, compared to only about 60,000 for both Stickam.com and Ustream.tv. Comscore measures visitors on a monthly basis, but shows a similar relative breakdown, with Justin.tv pulling in 1.9 million monthly uniques worldwide versus 860,000 for Stickam, 790,000 for Ustream.tv, and 440,000 for Mogulus. (See chart below).
Both of these measure only the traffic to the main Websites of each competing live Web video service, and do not include how many people watch the videos in embeddable players elsewhere on the Web. But they are apples-to-apples and should give a good indication of the overall trend.
Ustream.tv, at least, realizes it needs to change something in order to catch up. Today it launched a redesign of its site, which gives DIY broadcasters the ability to add text and graphic overlays to their videos and better metrics on how many people are watching their videos. Also, viewers can now subscribe to specific broadcasters. The company claims 10 million unique viewers overall for the month of June, including videos watched offsite. It has 410,000 registered users. 100,000 of them are active and are broadcasting 10,000 to 15,000 live events a day Some of its better known users include Johnny Knoxville, Dane Cook, James Blunt, The Plain White Ts, and both Presidential campaigns. Steve Gillmor, the editor of TechCrunchIT, uses it as well for his NewsGang Live show.
But that right there might just be the problem. Would you rather watch Steve Gillmor talking with his wife about Twitter on a split screen while her cat climbs the couch in the background (this is actually on right now), or French cowgirls in bikinis on Justin.tv? No offense, Steve, but the featured live streams on Justin.tv just seem younger and more fun than the stuff on Ustream.tv.
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.
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. Ustream.tv is attracting the professional, higher quality streaming shows so if you want to be in that space, you’ll be well positioned. Their tool set including full video conversion makes for a solid product. Justin.tv has a slant towards a younger, Gen Y audience, and if you’re pitching more to that audience it’s the better place to be. I also found when testing both that Justin.tv was more reliable for streaming quality from outside of the United States, and at times Ustream.tv was unusable for me, even on a 14mb down, 1mb up ADSL2 connection; you wouldn’t experience this in the US however. Of the others, Mogulus has a stronger emphasis on professional video and doesn’t have the strong community yet, BlogTV has a lot of potential, and Stickam seems to be dominated by soft porn, at least when I visited it.
Distribution
I asked Chris Pirillo for some tips for this post and one of his key points was simply: “you must understand that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.” Like it or not YouTube dominates online video today more than Google dominates search in the United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. TubeMogul is one the oldest of the video distribution sites, and is simple to use and free. You upload your video to their servers, enter you user name and password for a list of sites (first time only) then press the button and off they go. TubeMogul also tracks traffic statistics from each site so you can see which videos are being watched there. An alternative service is Hey!Spread (our review here).
The other consideration in distribution is getting your video onto other devices, like iPods. The key is to provide the correct file type and feed for services such as iTunes. You can do it manually with a WordPress plugin and by making sure the file is available on your server in the correct format, or you can use Blip.tv.
We’ve covered the occasionalcontent deal on Blip.tv but we’ve never seriously looked at their distribution platform, and it’s the reason shows like Rocketboom, Mahalo Daily and Moblogic are using Blip.tv. On top of the obvious video hosting everyone in this space provides, Blip.tv also offers distribution to external blogs (including an automatic option), the Internet Archive, de.licio.us (links), Flickr (pics from the video), Adobe Media Player, MySpace, Twitter (text alerts), Facebook, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Akimbo, Lycos Mix, MeeVee, MeFeedia, Meebo, Blinkx, Splashcast, Pando and the most important one of all: iTunes. Blip.tv offers an iTunes subscription feed and file conversion service; users do have to manually go to the dashboard within Blip.tv and request the file conversion on a free account, but with a premium account ($8/ mth or $80/ yr) get the conversion done automatically. A premium account also has other benefits, such as priority file transcoding that in my testing made it the quickest service available (that is time from when the video was uploaded until it was ready to view).
There was an argument between Ze Frank and Rocketboom a year or two back where Ze Frank disputed Rocketboom’s viewer numbers as they were reporting 10x the traffic of Ze’s The Show. The key to Rocketboom’s success has always been distribution, and for a long time you couldn’t open a media player without seeing Rocketboom pre-loaded. Distribution is key, and combining services like TubeMogul and Blip.tv make it a lot easier.
Content
Chris Pirillo told me that the key is to make sure every video has something different, and that you should use supportive text with each video posted as Google loves text. Ultimately what you decide to create is up to you: it may be something simple like a web cam chat, or you may want to get more creative. We cant tell you what will work for you, but the easiest way to start is to get on YouTube and just see what different people are doing, you’re sure to find something to inspire you.
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.”
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 is still anybody’s game):
Justin.TV will today start offering live mobile streaming to its users via a tie-up with Qik.
With the new service, Justin.TV users will have a option to stream from a mobile phone directly from their control panel without the need to have a Qik account. The integration is seamless, and the only difference in the video feed will be a Qik logo somewhere on the screen.
Qik has grown rapidly since first launching in invite only alpha testing. Despite not being open for signups, the service has over 2000 regular users (Scoble and Calacanis among them) and is growing at approx. 20% a week. Justin.TV needs little introduction, having created the live streaming genre and gone on to become a highly popular service.
I spoke to Justin.TV’s Michael Seibel and Qik’s Bhaskar Roy prior to today’s announcement. Justin.TV sees the deal as a value add for its users that gives it an edge over competitors. I mentioned Qik’s partnership with Mogulus and Seibel said that Justin.TV doesn’t see Mogulus as a competitor, noting that while their focus is on webcams and quick to use and stream shows, Mogulus is focused on high quality, TV level productions. Roy said that Qik sees the partnership as another way to get their service out to more users, and that after their testing phase they are ready for the growth the Justin.TV deal will bring.
Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”
Chen: “2008. We’ll do it this year.
“Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”
Now for the guessing game: which live video startup will fold first once YouTube dominates the market? YouTube will be last to market, but the same momentum that has seen YouTube dominate video will now be applied to live video. Like video, content creators want to be on the service that gives them the most exposure, no matter how good the alternatives area (after all, YouTube doesn’t offer the best quality video). YouTube already has the user base; live video streamers will flock to YouTube like a moth to a flame.
LiveVideo.com from MySpace founder Brad Greenspan’s company LiveUniverse is yet another live streaming service, but it combines the best of existing services with Yahoo Live style functionality for a package worth looking at.
LiveVideo.com offers the following features:
show archiving, so users can record shows to be played back later
embedding of live streams
chat associated with the stream
video conferencing Yahoo Live style, in that users can add other streaming users to their page and interact with them
Comment board/ profile page similar to YouTube where users can leave comments
Photo gallery, no quite Flickr, but allows users to share photos
LiveUniverse is pitching LiveVideo.com as “the first fully interactive, global, live streaming platform;” it’s not, but it is a feature rich offering that may well find favor.
If you ever considered yourself a Marv Albert or John Madden in training, YouCastr is the place for you. The site just launched out of a quiet beta. It’s kind of like Ustream or Justin.tv for sports commentary. The site lets anyone stream live broadcasts of game commentary or cut random rants in archived podcasts. Listeners can tune into commentary covering the latest sports games and chat live or leave comments. Here’s an example of a good podcast.
While I’m not quite ready to turn down the volume on my TV to hear Joe Schmo’s coverage of the Superbowl, a place for sports fans to post sports rants for later listening has promise. There’s already a vibrant community of sports bloggers covering news and even live blogging games. These same bloggers would probably love to easily make audio broadcasts like the best of them. YouCastr makes that easy.
With the entry of Yahoo into the live video category and Ustream acquisition rumors, there’s a lot of interest in the live format. YouCastr’s focus on sports strikes me as a good way to inject a sense of purpose and consistency missing from some lifecasting sites. When you go on Justin.tv, you don’t always know what you’re going to get, but YouCastr will always give you something sports related.
YouCastr was built over the past year by a team of four and is funded in the mid six figures by a team of angels.
Ustream.tv is said to be in advanced talks with Microsoft to be acquired for $50 million, according to a report from Valleywag. Given it’s very early morning as the post goes live we are unable to put calls in to confirm the deal, but might have more later.
Ustream.tv is one of the first wave of live streaming service providers that includes companies such as Justin.tv, Blogtv and Mogulus. Ustream.tv has offered a complete package of streaming and post show videos, and has a strong reputation as a reliable provider of live shows and events. The company announced a deal January 29 to stream the Republican convention, and has also featured other events including shows with Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris. Ustream.tv is also the home of major league live streamers including Chris Pirillo, and also scored a viral win with Walrus TV.
The acquisition, if true, does seem a little strange timing wise given Microsoft’s takeover offer for Yahoo, however Valleywag suggests it’s a pre-emptive pre-Series A deal that will allow Microsoft to showcase Silverlight to a broader audience.
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.
United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. 
Ustream.TV
LiveVideo.com
