New Official Zazzle Store!

Hopefully this t-shirt company doesn't get bought out!

Check out the new store at: http://www.zazzle.com/justin_tv


make custom gifts at Zazzle

New Release March 28!

This week we've been back hard at work releasing new features, including:

• See where your friends are from your /username/friends page, or on your home page!
  
• Popout the video window from the channel page (Great for watching at work!)
  
• An updated channel page description with tags!
• Now working bandwidth detector!

As always, we're working 24/7 to make Justin.tv the best community site to be on, so if you have feedback, let us know by email or by sending us a message!

Have a great weekend,

Justin

Video system maintenance

We're currently working on bringing the video system back up to 100%, thanks for your patience! We should be up and running perfectly again soon!

Audio Update: FME2 Users

For those broadcasters who are experiencing audio "hiccups" while using Flash Media Encoder 2 and mp3 audio encoding, we have found that switching your audio codec to "nellymoser" alleviates the issue on most systems.

Feel free to leave comments here sharing your results. I will be checking them.

JTV March Madness - TheJwayShow

Jway from justin.tv/thejwayshow is hosting a Justin.tv March Madness contest. Here's a quote from www.thejway.org

Welcome to the 2008 JTV March Madness, where the top 64
broadcasters on justin.tv will go head to head until only one
broadcaster is left. Who will be the champion of 2008? That's up
to you. Download your bracket below and fill it out complete until
there is only one broadcaster remaining. Rename the file and
send it back to thejwayshow@gmail.com. We will tally the results
and broadcast them live on thejwayshow.tv. Watch us live
Thursday-27 @ 7:30pm PST as thejway and pceasy give there
predictions and converse live with the chatters and their
thoughts. Thursday-3 we'll do a play by play of the outcome until
the 2008 champion is crowned. Good luck to all the participants.

Check it out and fill out your brackets!

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).

Channel page improvements!

We've released a bunch of improvements to the channel page and profile pages today. Check them out:

Channel Pages

Chat now has a more usable interface which allows you to quickly open and close the users list. We've also rearranged some the menus, which should make it easier to find things! This is the first step to more chat features and improvements!



We've also redesigned the channel pages and added a new color (Links) in your settings. Some channels will be more effected by this update than others, make sure to check your channel page!

Profile Page

Viewers can now customize your profile! Go to your settings to upload a header and background and change your colors!

Categories and Chat Fixes!

We just released channel categories. The channel bar on channel pages now only displays other channels from your category, and there are category pages in the directory. Hopefully this will allow everyone to find more channels that they like!

We also just released new chat server code that should fix all the problems with netsplits, desynchronized user lists, bans and user colors. Bill has been working basically around the clock to make this work, so send him a message and let him know if things are going well! (also send him a message if things are broken :D )

Moving chat servers

We've had a few problems with the network our chat is on, so we're in the process of moving our chat servers over right now to our other colocation facility. Please bear with us, this should solve the netsplits problem (where some users can't see other users messages in chat), as well as allow us to quickly debug and fix the user list problem (where users can't see each other on the users list in chat).

Justin

Chat maintenance

We are doing some chat maintenance today - moving the servers to an alternate network provider. We'll try to minimize the disruption, but you might notice a few glitches. Thanks for your patience.

Network issues

Our apologies if it is taking a while to load JTV pages tonight. We're undergoing some network maintenance and will be back up to full speed shortly.

Justin

More chat scaling

We just doubled our chat capacity again, and also rolled out some new features to help chat automatically work its way around corporate firewalls for those of you who love to watch justin.tv instead of working - don't worry, we won't tell, we do it too ;-)

If chat doesn't connect right away, give it some time to try a bunch of different ports. Hopefully it will find one that works for you and you can get your chat fix! If not, email me at bill@justin.tv and I'll see what I can do to help.

JTV Scaling

Thanks to all our users who made this weekend one of the best ever in JTV history! With the influx of new people on the network, we've been working 24/7 for the past week scaling the site. We want everyone to know that Quality of Service is our one and only priority right now; here are some of the things we're doing to scale the site:

Chat

We've refactored chat to use multiple servers, and added additional security to stop spammer bots. In the next few days we'll be doubling our capacity again by some software patches to improve efficiency, and adding more servers! Thanks Bill for all your hard work!

Video

We've doubled the number of video servers we're running in the past week. We've also tweaked some algorithms on Python Media Server to lower buffering time. This week we're reorganizing our infrastructure slightly to decrease video load time.

Web

On the website, we just installed a new, much more efficient load balancer last week. We've also moved most of our static content on to a much faster CDN.

Up next: Categories

We've had a lot of our users tell us that with the influx of new channels its harder to be discovered. We'll be adding categories this week to make it a lot easier for viewers to find the channels they want, when they want them, and to give all our broadcasters a chance to be seen! Look for changes to the top bar and new sorts on the directory!

Town Hall Tomorrow, 8pm PST

Michael, our CEO, will be holding a live townhall for Justin.tv users from SXSW tomorrow night at 8pm PST to answer your questions about JTV and address any user concerns. Watch it live in the Help channel!

Customizable embed!

We've rearranged the video and chat embed so that you can now skin it, and it will fit in a column on most normal sites (myspace, blogger, etc)! Skin your own embed by clicking "Customize" button next to the embed code on the share form of any channel page. See our officecam skinned embed below!


Watch live video from officecam on Justin.tv

Chat

We doubled our chat capacity over the weekend, and I'm hoping to double it again today. It's hard work keeping up with the number of new users joining justin.tv, but this is the kind of problem we like having! Thanks for being patient while we scale. I'm making a lot of changes to the core chat server code, so please do email me at bill@justin.tv if you see anything that doesn't look right.

By the way, those of you who moderate a lot of different channels may be interested in mibbit, a nice full-featured chat client that works well with justin.tv for when you want to be in a bunch of different chat rooms without having to slow your computer down with too many video streams.

JTV Scaling

We've been experiencing quite a lot of traffic in the past few days, and are working hard on scaling to meet the load. Thanks for patience while we're making everything run super fast again!

Feature Development at Justin.tv

Everyone I talk to has been amazed at the speed of feature development at Justin.tv since late Dec 2007.

The development team at Justin.tv consists of 5 members: Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Kyle Vogt, Jacob Woodward, and William Bland. Over the past 2.5 months they have completed more than 10 releases and have rolled out a huge list of features. You can find the complete list on our blog.

Here is a small taste:

• Justin.tv Social Network (complete with profiles, messaging, friends list, 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 fully 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 (soon to be customizable)
  
• Localization (now you can find channels by language)
  
• Framework for surveying users on the site
  
• Contact importer for webmail
• and hundreds of tiny features like the ability to choose the color of your name in chat
  

The secret to our pace of development has proven to be process.

In December the development team implemented a new weekly release schedule:

• Priorities are divvied up by the team on Friday
  
• New development starts on Saturday morning
  
• On Wednesday we decide what is going to be ready for this week's release
• Thursday afternoon is for testing
• Friday morning is release

The process is kept organized through daily 5 minute "standing" coordination meetings that only tech team members participate in (standing so that they don't take longer than 5 minutes). As a result, everyone on the team has a clear understanding of what they are working on and what their team members are working on, team coordination and communication doesn't interrupt development time, and team members can more readily encourage and help each other throughout the week.

As the company has grown, we have strived to find a happy medium between the complete individual programmer independence of our early days and the robotic & bureaucratic nightmares of larger tech companies.

The results speak for themselves...

Every Friday, Justin.tv users now know to expect new improvements on the site, traffic has more than doubled in the past 2 months, and both pageviews and uniques have grown every week for more than 12 weeks in a row.

Who would have thought that just a touch of process and a little bit of organization could result in such a remarkable increase in productivity?

I would encourage other start-ups to reconsider their release cycle and their team coordination as a method to increase development horsepower.

- Michael Seibel, CEO Justin.tv