Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

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> FWIW when Twitch started as justin.tv it was much, much poorer quality than 8000k.

Yup, to expand on that I had a chance to chat with someone at Justin.tv and they said a thirty second ad pays a lot more than the cost of serving video for an hour. iirc this was around 2009 or 2010?

Also, iirc even through 2014, my friends who played League of Legends (lol) used to watch stream on VLC instead of directly on the website on Twitch. The consensus was for lol, 720p60 was preferable to 1080p30.

I don't think Twitch got where it got because of technical prowess. If I had to guess, it was just lucky being first. It would be interesting to hear stories from the people at YouTube. Why did it take them so long to add live streaming?

Justin.tv offered pro accounts for preferred data transfers, as it would lag just watching a stream at 360p at best (not that they had quality options back in the day). I know I paid for it, just so that I could watch illegal cough Simpsons streams.

Justin.tv/Twitch.tv wasn't first though. Livestream and Ustream, for instance, were relevant before Justin.tv. It's just that they messed up along the way and people always migrated to the next service. When people did so from Ustream to Justin.tv, the latter never really did and as such, people never really left. However, they had a competitor in the form of own3d.tv for a good amount of time....but own3d.tv lost the holding-the-breath battle, as I don't think they really had financial backing unlike Twitch.tv then. If any larger company had paid attention back then (around 2012), the international streaming space might have looked different.

Live streaming wasn't the issue, it was live gaming streaming. Everyone was blocking it because it ate up tons of bandwidth (and there were copyright concerns). Justin.tv was small, well connected, and knew the numbers well enough to know how to capitalize on it.

You should recheck that assumption and watch some of their old tech talks. They made some good pivots and had to move quickly to scale with the growth they had.

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