We got a surprising bit of news earlier this week, The White House will be using Justin.tv. What?!?! Yea, that’s what we thought too. After checking the White House visitor logs to see if Michael or Justin were behind this (they’re not) it seemed like this might indeed be legit.

So we went about figuring out exactly what would be going on. Vice President Joe Biden, it turns out, will be speaking in Tel Aviv on Thursday and the White House couldn’t get their usual camera crew and broadcasting setup over there. Why? We don’t know. But hey, what a perfect time to use Justin.tv since one of our most important goals is to make live video easier to use. The White House shouldn’t need a complicated setup, and apparently they agree.

It was around this time that we saw a post from Christina Wilkie on TheHill.com confirming that Joe Biden’s speech would be on Justin.tv. Pretty soon after, Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote about it as well. Then Liz Shannon Miller at NewTeeVee threw her hat in the ring.

At this point we had nailed down a few details. For instance, the speech will be on The U.S. Embassy’s Justin.tv page and you can watch it on Thursday at 1am pacific. While this all came together in quite a rush, we’re excited to have the Vice President on Justin.tv. And we’re even more excited that this isn’t a big, elaborate production that most users would have no chance to replicating. The folks running the broadcast are plugging a camera into a laptop and going. That’s the way we think live video can be really powerful for everyone to use, and that includes the Vice President!