Justin.tv: An Open Network

We finally opened up the network! Over the past several months we've had a lot of great success with our beta broadcaster program, with broadcasters of all types from all walks of life broadcasting on Justin.tv. We've had presidential candidates, established bands and up-and-coming artists, models, photographers, radio hosts, and more than a few former Justin.tv fans turned broadcaster themselves. All of this happened as part of the journey towards a truly open broadcaster platform, one that would allow anyone and everyone to come to the site and broadcast (and hopefully broadcast something interesting!).

After months of hard work by Kyle, Emmett, Jacob, Bill, Phil and Michael, we finally looked at the site and deemed it worthy of the general public. It took building our own custom Flash live video server and IRC chat server before we were comfortable doing it, and it a few more months than we thought, but I'm super proud to introduce the brand new Justin.tv platform, which incorporates all the ideas and features that I've been ranting about for months.

I was looking around the site this evening watching some of the broadcasters, and realized something I never thought I'd realize: it had been an hour and I was addicted to watching the broadcasters on Justin.tv. After six and a half months of being in the spotlight, I think I'll be happy to sit back for a while and be a viewer :)