The brains behind: Justin.tv

23/08/2007 | Filed under Discover

Since 17 March, Justin Kan has been broadcasting himself on the internet, attracting up to 19,000 viewers. Here, he talks about his motivation, technical obstacles and ultimate vision for thousands of live broadcast channels

.net: How did Justin.tv originate?

JK: I’d actually just gone through a bad break-up with a long-time girlfriend, and between that and the tanking of our online calendar start-up, Kiko (due to the release of Google Calendar), I was looking to do something new and crazy that would hopefully let me meet a bunch of new people. I’ve always gone with my most off-the-wall ideas and this one topped them all. So I decided that this was the best way to get the message that Justin Kan was out on the market again and wanted to meet that special girl.

.net: What’s off-limits? What kind of stuff don’t you want to broadcast (or don’t you want other people to broadcast), and why not?

JK: I try not to broadcast those people who don’t want to be filmed. For myself and the rest of the “lifecasters” on the Justin.tv network, broadcasting copyrighted content is against our terms of service, and will be pulled (after all, it’s against the law). For ethical reasons, we’ll also pull any broadcasts that promote criminal or socially irresponsible behaviour.

.net: What’s been your favourite moment on camera?

JK: It was definitely when NBC’s Carson Daly joined Rich Rosenblatt, the former chairman of MySpace, onstage at a conference I was in the audience of, and did a live parody of Justin.tv.

.net: How does it feel to be watched all the time?

JK: You get used to it. When I first started, I was paranoid that I wasn’t being entertaining enough. Now, I’m pretty comfortable going about my daily life and doing a lot of work without worrying constantly that my viewership is being bored to death. Rolling out other shows definitely helped take the burden of needing to be entertaining 24/7 off.

.net: How close is Justin.tv to The Truman Show?

JK: Truman in The Truman Show didn’t know he was on camera, and the cameras were embedded in a fake community all around him. Justin.tv is real; the real-life story of an entrepreneur and his friends and co-founders as they try to build a successful platform for publishing live video to the internet. I’ve voluntarily given up my privacy for the sake of the show, unlike the fictional Truman, who was forced into the situation unknowingly through circumstance.

.net: How do you explain the show’s success?

JK: I believe that people like watching other people. It’s in our nature to want to feel connected to other people, and Justin.tv and shows similar to it (really all television to an extent) is a low-cost way of getting that connection, which is why I believe it’s so popular. The idea of a real life Truman Show or Ed TV is also a fairly compelling and easy-to-pick-up news story, which garnered us a lot of national media attention.

.net: What kind of tools and techniques are you using?

JK: We’re using a laptop with EVDO to broadcast to our servers, which run our own custom server software to distribute live Flash video to viewers on our website.

.net: What are the challenges of broadcasting live video over the internet?

JK: The technology for live video online via Flash is just barely there. We had to build lots of the components ourselves, including the entire back-end infrastructure, because there just weren’t any usable options out there.

.net: How expensive is it to stream quality video?

JK: When we switched off our contracts with the major content delivery networks, we reduced the cost of streaming 38x to under a penny per every hour of video served.

.net: Why did you decide to expand and launch other 24/7 channels like iJustine?

JK: We realised that I could only ever be in one place at any one time, and in order to get a lot of quality content on the site, we would need to recruit other interesting people to do live broadcasts. I’d met Justine at MacWorld in January, and she guest-spotted my camera for a day. When we were looking for my successors, she came up because she’s charismatic and a natural star in front of a camera.

.net: What’s planned next?

JK: Our eventual goal is to bring the ability to broadcast live video to everyone on the internet. Previous to Justin.tv, if you wanted to do a live broadcast, you’d need a $200,000 satellite truck, which is something most people don’t have. By lowering the cost of easy, live video online, I think we’ll see many more creative uses of live. I imagine tens of thousands of live broadcast channels all going through Justin.tv, the portal for discovering live video online.