Justin's life online 24/7'During November of 2006, I joined up Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Michael Seibel to start a company called Justin.tv. The concept was pretty simple - build a website that features a live video feed of Justin's life. We did it, and it was wildly successful. Over 2.5 million people tuned in to watch Justin's during our first month of operation. We're currently turning Justin.tv into a platform so that anyone can have their own Justin.tv.
I designed and built the
hardware for Justin.tv. This turned out to be a very nontrivial task.
There weren't any off the shelf solutions to transmit live video from
wherever Justin decided to go, so I had to invent one. Sprint was just
starting to kick on their nationwide EVDO network in January of 2007, so I
took advantage of it. Justin carried a backpack with a video encoder,
small Linux PC, four EVDO modems, and a huge battery. The backpack
weighed about 15 pounds and lasted about 8 hours on a single battery
charge. The Linux PC ran custom software that striped the video data
across all four EVDO modems simultaneously. The quality was good enough
that nobody believed the video was actually wireless and actually live, so
I consider it a success.
Update: Brian Lam from Gizmodo.com wrote
a
nice piece about my work on Justin.tv hardware.
We chose to display Justin's live video feed in Flash. Unfortunately, we had no idea how poor Flash handled live video until we had already committed to it in just about every way. Our original video software setup involved two Linux proxy servers, a Windows PC, and at least a dozen programs and scripts. Everything was a workaround for the limitations in either Flash or the available Flash video encoders. By April of 2007, I rewrote just every useful part of Adobe's Flash Media Server in Python. We now serve millions of live Flash videos each month without a single piece of Adobe software, other than the Flash player in your browser.
See what is Justin is doing right now:
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