Posts Tagged ‘ LifeCast

A look back at the early days of Justin.tv

It is so hard to believe that I have been apart of Justin.tv for over a year now. So much has changed in a year. Some things good and some things bad. Through JTV I have had many awesome memories and met so many great people. Without Justin.tv I would never had joined twitter. I would have never started doing videos and I most importantly would have never started this blog. All this social crap I am into nowadays all began with Justin.tv. But lets take a look back to 1 year ago from my perspective.

5 days after they launched I discovered Justin Kan and JTV. The concept of the site was interesting to me. Before Justin came around you had 24/7 video broadcasts but the cameras were always stationary. The fact that Justin had a camera on his hat and it was streaming live audio and video all day long was just amazing to me. The 1st month had to be my favorite because you got to see these 4 guys try and figure out what to do with this startup. You were able to watch and listen to everything. In later months Justin would start muting the mic but in that 1st month you got to hear all the brainstorming and arguments. The epic battles between Emmett and Michael. The mysterious Kyle who wasn’t on camera much but we would hear about how he was a home wrecker. Of course you had Justin who would take the cam in the bathroom when he peed and pooped. It was more than just watching Justin all day. You got to watch the entire JTV crew sitting on the couches in a small apartment joking around and shooting ideas off each other. You also got to watch them deal with all the media attention and of course the people on the street wondering why he had a camera on his head

Nowadays you see the occasional person complain about chat but it is 10000x better than the early chat days. When the site 1st launched the chat was horrific. The early days with the old lingr chat was just horrid and it is painful to even think about. I can remember a small number of people started a chat on the efnet irc server because site chat was so bad. I used to spend most of my free time in that chat. It is also the 1st time I talked to iJustine who used to visit the chat once in a while before she started broadcasting. Also a JTV regular who is still around was in the chat all the time. That person being SprintNXT. I can also remember the old Peanut Gallery chat being a lot of fun. I really miss those days.

I could ramble on about this topic but I think this post is long enough hah. Let me end it by listing some of my favorite early moments on Justin.tv. Please feel free to list some of your favorite moments from JTV in the early days in the comments.

  • Of course everyone remembers the Police Raid.
  • GGJeffy and Justin in the elevator.
  • Justin’s first on air kiss
  • Justin getting kicked out of the Gap and then reading my email later on about how I called the store.
  • Justin’s love for the mustard shorts.
  • Losing reception in the elevator
  • Digh at the apartment wearing a GoDaddy shirt and Justin constantly looking at her chest. Goooodadddy!
  • The Weeblies and Kyle sneaking into the bedroom and stealing the camera while Justin slept.
  • Jumping in the pool after getting 100 diggs.

Like I said I could go on and on about this stuff. The great thing about JTV is that it has archives. The archiver didn’t work that well back then but there is still a lot of video archived from March and April of 2007 so feel free to go back to the beginning of JTV time and watch it from the start! Also check out some of the old Justin.tv fan blogs. Justin.tv The Real Cast and also Justin.TV Guide.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Y! Live open to public. What impact will it have?

Y! Live Whoa Error Image

Yahoo! Live or also known now as Y! Live made its debut to the public yesterday. Many people were late to the party and got there when the party was at maximum capacity. Everyone included myself were greeted by the image above. The most visited site on the net could not handle a few hundred people going to live.yahoo.com to watch some live streams. It seems that the Yahoo! Live team were not expecting this many people and it makes me wonder why they didn’t have some sort of private beta to help test this thing out before it was open to everyone. One thing that is safe to say is the service will run smoothly once they throw some servers at.

Having a major internet brand like Yahoo! jump into the live streaming business is going have a major impact on some of the live video sites. If Y! Live becomes slightly popular you could see other major companies such as Google and News Corp joining in and trying to play catch up. The easiest way to play catch up would be to buy a startup. So is it possible that in the future we could see such sites as Justin.tv, Ustream or even BlogTV being bought up. Guess we will just to wait and see what the future holds. I’m anxious to see what happens.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Yahoo! jumps into “lifecasting”

Rumors are flying around the internet that Yahoo is going to offer a “lifecasting” service. It is reported that the service is only open to Yahoo employees for the moment. The url for the new service looks like it will be http://live.yahoo.com/. It is currently giving a 403 forbidden error when you go to that address so we are all blocked out. I’m hoping Yahoo will make a formal announcement about the service. We need more details.

One thing that is kind of annoying me is everyone using the term “lifecasting”. This new service will have very little lifecasting going on. My predictions are that this new Yahoo service will be just another chatcasting site. What I mean by chatcasting is users will be sitting in front of their computer with the web cam on them and they will be chatting with viewers. This is not lifecasting! Lifecasting to me is broadcasting your everyday events. It is about being mobile and letting others peek in to what you are doing for the day. This is going to be just another web cam site where 15 year old girls fire up their cam and dance around while a bunch of horny guys say immature and stupid comments. We will have to wait and see but I don’t think anything new or innovative will be coming from Yahoo’s new service. What do you think about it?

Popularity: 25% [?]

Justin.tv adds social features. Profiles, friending and more

Justin.tv adds profiles. Here is smojo's profile



Justin.tv has changed so much since it first began. Some changes have been good and some have been bad. The latest and greatest thing they have added is profiles. There are still a few bugs and kinks with the new social features but that is expected. Now viewers and broadcasters can make a profile for themselves.
So what are all the new social features? Well you have many of the myspace features. You are able to friend people, comment on their pages, send private messages, and also add channels to your favorites. Pretty normal stuff. Let me just say that the next feature I’m about to talk about is one that I’m not liking to much. On your profile page it now displays the last thing you wrote in chat and also the last channel you were watching. I would really like them to give us the option to not have this displayed. I don’t know why but having that on my profile is kinda weird.
So there are the new features they added. Feel free to friend me on yet another site. http://justin.tv/smojo/profile

Popularity: 16% [?]