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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

They are using the better-working brand for re-entering these markets after the first attempt failed years ago... seems logical to me? The name JustinTV IMHO has a lot of negative baggage attached because it wasn't very successful for so long.

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It dilutes Twitch as a place for gaming, though.

EDIT: Downvoted, maybe I wasn't clear enough. Context is very important within a brand. If you start offering all types of videos on Twitch, the landing page isn't just going to show gaming videos any longer.

Sure. But we've yet to see any competitor affect Twitch's dominance in gaming by any real margin, so it seems unlikely that people who have been using it exclusively for gaming will be turned off when other things become available. I mean, they have a dedicated viewer base which won't really care what Twitch does with their homepage. It's like Amazon expanding from just selling books to selling everything. People looking for books are still gonna keep going there.

Does it significantly damage the image of Twitch as the place to go for gaming streams? YouTube has been gaining a lot of high production quality content makers for a while now (e.g. web series and music videos) but I feel like it still holds its reputation as the place to go for more independently made content as well.

I didn't mean to insinuate it was damaging, just that the brand would be diluted. Yes, if they can pull it off and maintain and support the different communities - then it won't be "damaged."

It was also an objectively terrible name. I thought it was just iJustine's personal webcasting site.

It wasn't terrible for its original purpose, which was to livestream a man named Justin's life continuously, a la the Truman Show.

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