News

Justin.TV Closes for Good

By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)

Blazing a trail in live streaming video, Justin.TV literally wrote the book on how to live your life online. But that was eight years ago, and that’s an eternity in Internet years. With more users spending time streaming game play on Twitch.TV, Justin began moving away from traditional live streaming a few months back by closing down its streaming video archive. And today, they took the final step, by going offline for good and closing down not only the Justin.TV website, but also their mobile apps, and API. And that could be a good thing because it means they can really focus on their more popular video game streaming service.

 

“J TV will probably be remembered as one of the most awkward internet experiments of all time. It’s one of those things that can only happen in the age of the internet. - Kevin Lin, Justin.tv COO

In 2007 Justin.TV was founded by college student Justin Kan and a group of friends, who may have also pioneered the notion of wearable computing as Kan wore a head mounted webcam 24/7 in order to live his life completely online. It was a novel idea, but soon many saw that there’s really not a lot of exciting things that happen living your daily life.

But while many people were looking to move away after three or four minutes of first person eating, or staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, Kan knew it would give birth to a new thing… video streaming, and what saved Justin.TV was YouTube star iJustine, who partnered with Justin.TV to create a live streaming channel. One channel turned into 60, and Kan and his friends had a huge, multi-million dollar streaming video empire of reality stars living their lives online.

Then in 2007, Justin.TV grew again, creating a live streaming platform that would allow anyone to stream live for free. And in less than a year, over a million users were streaming live video on the Internet. And this is how Justin.TV was for the next four years, people streaming themselves talking, doing technology shows, and even connecting their satellite TV to it in order to rebroadcast NFL games, pirate fashion.

But there was also a growing segment of users who used it to broadcast video game play and doing commentaries, and soon, Justin.TV had a new direction… and it was called Twitch. And now, three years later, Twitch has users all around the world and is one of the biggest uses of live streaming video online. They even invented SocialCam, which was considered the Instagram of video before Vine.

But when Google bought Twitch for $1 billion, you kinda felt that Kan’s great experiment was on the clock. And it wouldn’t be long before it would close. In February, Justin.TV changed it’s name to Twitch Interactive, and by June, took the next step by closing down its cloud based video archive. Users had only a few days to seek other alternatives for storing their hours of video online and get it downloaded before it was shut down. Justin claimed it was because the service simply wasn’t being used. But now we know that it was merely the first broadside in an overall strategy to transition away from Justin.TV in order to focus solely on growing Twitch.

And that sounds like Google has pushed for this. And it makes sense since Google Hangouts is largely designed with the same purpose in mind. So keeping Justin.TV open cannibalizes Google Hangouts. And that doesn’t make any sense. So while I understand focusing on putting your eggs in the most profitable basket, could it have killed Google to give users more notice?

http://player.vimeo.com/video/101365279

Hat Tip – The Verge

The post Justin.TV Closes for Good appeared first on Doddle.