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Justin.tv’s Newest App Now Broadcasts Live Video From Your iPhone (techcrunch.com)
42 points by abstractbill on Sept 16, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



Does/Could this app locate or detect a user is at a particular event?

If Justin.tv could sort by event, other users could watch events like outsidelands music festival and flip through all the different view angles of the concert.

I understand event based results can be found by searching, but the idea of a collection of event streams intrigues me. Just an idea..


anyone from JTV on here? I would love to see/help make this happen. steve at stevederico dot com


Caleb of JTV here. This is a very intriguing idea. We think location will be a big part of live broadcast discovery. Nothing to announce yet.


How long until Google releases a similar thing for YouTube and Justin.tv starts to suffer? :(


Not convinced Google could hurt Justin.tv the way you're imagining; the Justins have too many deals, too much traction.


Can you be more specific here, minus the buzzwords, what "deals" and "traction" does justin.tv have that google/youtube can't hurt them? HN tends to go gaga over YC funded company for no obvious reason and often (but maybe not in this case) rationality and reason goes out of the window.


I agree: http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv%2C+ustream

Their problem is branding. When you think "realtime video streaming online" does the word "justin" even enter your mind?

http://www.google.com/search?q=stream+online - nowhere to be found; http://www.google.com/search?q=video+stream - over halfway down the page

It's quite sad. justin.tv's infrastructure is better than their more popular competitors, but performance doesn't always win the mindshare war.


I think the results if you add 'youtube live' to the comparison are interesting.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv,+ustream,+youtube+l...

I don't think they'll have much trouble establishing market share once they launch.


Agreed. Even after reading this entire article I was unable to locate the app on my iPhone as I was searching for everything except justin.tv

Justin.tv should consider an updated business model where they branch out their video streaming products and rename them to increase comprehension for consumers.


Sorry for the buzzwords. What I meant was: there are whole classes of people who are very used to using Justin.tv (and ustream to a lesser extent) for live video. Maybe some of them would switch to Google if YouTube suddenly offered live streaming, but my feeling is that this is a Twitter vs. Google Buzz situation. Google can offer, but if the digerati are already used to another service, they won't necessarily switch.

Justin.tv is kind of a dark horse -- ustream may be better known, but Justin.tv is actually bigger. The Justin guys can probably explain this better than I can. :-)


Qik.com (in addition to having a 3 letter domain) has had that functionality for a while. I've used it on my HTC Incredible to record video and have people watch, and also auto-upload to youtube.

Not as well known as Justin.tv though.


Qik's iPhone broadcaster doesn't access the hardware video encoder, which unfortunately means that the output of their app is more like a slideshow than a real video stream.

We deliberately waited until the platform could support an app we would be proud of.


Do you have HW encoding on Android? Does it vary by device and/or OS version?


Yes and yes. We detect and use a hardware encoder on Android whenever one is present. It isn't always there, so we fall back to software encoding if we have to.


Well that's pretty cool then. I'll check out the app. Thanks for the reply.


LOL @ the pic. iPhone in the night? hahaha The distortion would make my ears bleed too.


Proud beta tester here: works quite well. :-)




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