The Justin.tv Story: Year 1

Justin.tv started when Justin Kan and Emmett Shear took on the challenge of broadcasting one person's life 24/7. Being web developers, they recruited co-founders Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt to run the business and build a live streaming video camera. For investment, they spoke with Paul Graham of Y-Combinator (an investor in their previous start-up) and raised seed capital.

The Justin.tv website launched in March of 2007 to significant fanfare. Justin's life was featured in a number of mainstream news outlets including: The Today Show, MTV News, USA Today, Nightline, NPR, Newsweek, Businessweek, The Financial Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. He was also written about in a number of blogs including: Techcrunch, Gizmodo, NewTeeVee, Valleywag, and Mashable.

During the first couple of months, feedback was quite positive but very specific. Justin.tv viewers overwhelmingly wanted the opportunity to broadcast themselves. Scaling the live broadcasting system took a significant amount of work. Between late spring and early fall of 2007, a new Justin.tv was built. To complete the project 3 great employee's were added to the Justin.tv team: Jacob Woodward (graphic designer), Phil Reyneri (producer and community liaison), and William Bland (chat & web developer). In addition, a number of great investors contributed additional captial: Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, Aydin Senkut, Mike Maples, Georges Harik, and Alsop Louie Partners. Throughout the summer new lifecasters broadcasted along side Justin to add additional content to the site and help test the new code being generated. Some of these original broadcasters were: iJustine, Naked Cowboy, Sarah Meyers, Parris Harris, Mooncricket, Wild 94.9, the Ron Paul Campaign Gizmodo, and Kotaku.

On Oct 3rd, the new Justin.tv was launched. From this date forward, anyone with a laptop, a webcam, and an internet connection could broadcast live video online. The relaunch was covered by the LA Times, Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and the Chicago Tribune. The site began to quickly acquire new broadcasters and viewers but a great deal of new features were required in order for traffic growth to become truly significant. In order to facilitate rapid new feature development and open lines of communication with the growing community a weekly development cycle, a customer service process, and weekly office hours were implemented. These changes helped to shape and accelerate the creation of a number of core features including:

• Justin.tv Social Network (complete with profiles, messaging, friends list, etc)
• Twisted Chat Server 2.0 (the best and most scalable IRC chat server online)
• Safe Chat 1.0 (moderation, spam protection, word filtering, etc)
• Python Media Server 2.0 (faster, more scalable, and with auto stream replication)
• Justin.tv Archive System 2.0 (navigate by day and time)
• Justin.tv Broadcaster 2.0 w/ auto bandwidth detection
• New Frontpage with a new non-programmer controlled CMS
• Video Playlists with the ability to import videos from Youtube
• Private Channels
• On Site Notifications (know when your friends are online, when your favorite channels go live, and invite friends to the channel that you are watching)
• Embeddable Chat and Chat + Video Embed
• Localization (now you can find channels by language)
• Categories (Featured, People & Lifecasting, Sports, Music & Radio, Gaming, News & Tech, Animals, Entertainment, Divas & Dudes)

Today, the site is growing faster than ever before. In recognition of Justin.tv first birthday, here are a number of statistics from over the past year.

1 Year Statistics:

• 85,335,630 pageviews
• 4,823,411 absolute unique visitors
• 57 years of archives
• 28106 total channels
• 356197 registered users
• 73,754 user created video clips

Last 30 day stats

• 21,859,147 pageviews
• 1,560,112 absolute unique visitors
• 11 years of archives
• 6954 new channels
• 73,534 registered users
• 26,500 user created video clips

Peaks:

• 3.6 gbps video
• 32,000 simultaneous viewers

1 Year Traffic Graph:

The Justin.tv team thanks all of the great broadcasters, viewers, investors, and well wishers that made the previous year possible. A special thanks go out to our family members who have supported us through this journey and our site admins who help new viewers and broadcasters everyday on Justin.tv (Wayne, Honest Guy, Smojo, Flynn, Mark, and Norah).