Justin.tv has shut down | Hacker News Reader

Justin.tv has shut down

justin.tv

396 pointsabstractbill138 comments

I recently signed up on twitch and started watching 1-2 hours of streams a day, usually whenever TotalBiscuit, Hafu, or Amaz are on in the evenings CST (which isn't terribly often). I also use Netflix exclusively as opposed to cable or satellite, and this is the unfortunate result:

http://i.imgur.com/i7MKXWC.png

I used to think I'd have to torrent to hit typical consumer data caps, but that's no longer the case. I didn't do any torrenting whatsoever in July, but I still used over 300GB.

Even if Verizon ever pull their head out of their rear in regards to peering, so long as data caps exist we'll still be artificially throttled in our internet usage.

I use twitch for three things.

1) tips on how to play some games better

2) entertainment

3) determine if a game has any potential for me to buy

I cannot estimate how much twitch has saved me because of #3

Towelliee, TotalBiscuit, and a few others, can make even rotten games look and sound good

Data caps do suck, but I do have a happy memory of working the system.

Around March of 2011, Verizon Wireless was promoting it's new 4G networking by offering unlimited data plans. I bought an HTC Thunderbolt, the Verizon network's first 4G phone, and promptly started tethering it to my laptop using a program called Easy Tether (purchased through the Amazon's app store).

While I had that phone, I would routinely consume hundreds of gigs of bandwidth each month, mostly from watching streaming videos. I wasn't even torrenting. Before there were a bunch of other people using 4G, I got some pretty good download speeds. One day, I remember downloading the Xcode, a 4 or 5 gig download, within a few minutes. Another day, Speedtest clocked my download speed at something like 33gps, although 9 to 12 gigs per second for the norm.

Today I'm on a cheapo prepaid wireless plan and settle for 2G download speeds of about 50kbs, which is fine most of the time. My cheapo phone plan and cable internet subscription are cheaper than any reasonable plan Verizon Wireless offers. For now, I'll enjoy my reasonably speedy Netflix streaming at home until Comcast throttles my download speeds to that of a 28.8K modem.

33 gbps? Those units seem quite unlikely.

Given that the person stated that they are only consuming hundreds of gigabytes I think we can assume that they mean megabits not gagabits.

So you're the reason they kicked us all off unlimited plans!

-1 for blaming users to acually use what they pay for.

If the company isn't able provide unlimited plans, it shouldn't have offered those in the first place. It's more honest to clearly communicate the real volume limit from the very beginning, instead of making false promises.

Take a joke. I agree though; hence why I switched to T-Mobile. It's technically, "unmetered", due to them capping your data speed after X/GB's

9 to 12 gigs? As far as I know 4G doesn't even support 1Gbps, not to mention your HTC Thunderbolt filesystem (or RAM to store all that if the FS is slow :P)

I call this a typo or BS :)

Yup, I meant megabits per second :)

you still have limited plans for internet in the US?

We started out with limited, then everybody started advertising unlimited because they never thought anyone could use a ton of data. Then things like torrenting and Netflix and YouTube came along, and now everyone's using a lot of data again, so they're re-introducing data caps.

Of course, data caps are ridiculous in concept. It's not like they go out and dig up infrastructure when it's not in use. It's their anticompetitive attempt to put online video services out of business and reinvigorate the outdated and overpriced cable/satellite TV model.

Data caps seem fine as long as they keep up with technology. The problem is that even 5 years ago 300GB was barely reasonable and it is completely unreasonable today.

What I mean by "fine" is I would rather have a datacap and a higher speed that could potentially exceed the data cap if used 24/7 than a slower speed that creates a soft cap anyway.

I pay for 50Mbps internet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300GB+%2F+50Mbps

I wouldn't even have to use full speed 24/7 to hit that cap, only just over half a day.

When I was in university, I shared a house with a bunch of friends, we paid for 30Mbps, then I set up a router with nice cache system, QoS and all that stuff.

Most of the days we used around 100GB+, our isp called sometimes (two months interval more or less) to say that we hit our monthly data cap (which was 320GB), we got used to saying "ok, so cancel my plan, we are going to another ISP that don't put cap on our data usage" and then they continued the conversation saying that "this month we will not reduce our speed, but next time they would have to, unless you upgrade your plan", "no, thanks".

Since they were a new provider in the region, guess that the infrastructure were more than enough to sustain our use, and I was really surprised that the same excuse worked for around two years (then I graduated, don't know how it's now).

Given the nature of ISPs, networks and 95th percentile billing, a rational ISP would have advised you to keep it down between the hours of X and Y on days A through B.

At least one ISP around here offers unlimited data, but at reduced mbps during peak times. I can understand their plan, trying to maximize their resources without trying to break the laws of physics.

If only others would maximize their available resources. Since they aren't, it's (even more) clear that the caps are arbitrary and serve only to maintain video distribution monopolies.

> 5 years ago 300GB

Enter Belgium. There they advertise just how huge 150GB is. Living in the Netherlands using 2.5TB a month I can only pity them.

When I lived there (2009) my cap was 4GB/month. After that the download speed went down to 28.8kbps.

In Belgium, like, a developed country? Please tell me that was at least a mobile connection

Quite the opposite, it was university housing for faculty and graduate students. The most expensive residential plans at the time had a 20GB/month cap, IIRC.

That's offensive to developing countries. China for instance has no-cap internet for only a few hundred dollars per year.

> That's offensive

Well if it had been in Congo it would have made more sense, right?

It is misleading to sell something as unlimited when that can't actually be fulfilled, and it's unrealistic to believe you can buy something of value that is unlimited.

Setting a price for finite capacity that is to be reserved is a robust user-pays approach.

I don't expect unlimited, because that would be unrealistic. What I expect, if I paid for 50Mbps, is to be able to realistically consume 50Mpbs.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50Mbps+*+%28seconds+in+...

A 16TB data cap would be realistic and reasonable.

Maybe you should read the T&Cs, the 50mbps probably refers to the maximum speed you can expect

T&Cs don't mean squat when you're dealing with a monopoly. They can put any sort of consumer-unfriendly terms they want in there and then say "if you don't like it, you're free to go to our competitors" of which there is only one and they are colluding.

The problem is a fundamental incongruence between the costs to ISP's, and the corresponding costs to customers. It's not just consumer ISP's that are guilty of this racket, either. Most "cloud" hosts, Amazon included, are making huge margins by charging their customers for total data transferred, but only paying upstream for rate of transfer, i.e. bandwidth capacity at any given time.

To simplify, let's ignore last mile costs and at ISP's who own their own infrastructure. Let's also ignore peering. ISP's, and hosts like Amazon, pay for IP transit on a capacity basis, i.e. data per second, e.g. "$1 per month per mbps." They buy this IP transit from providers like Level3, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, etc. What this actually means is that they pay a monthly fee for some amount of fiber optic cables to plug into their servers/switches. These cables have a set bandwidth capacity, like 1gbps.

They could charge their customers in the same way, E.g. "$2 per month per mbps," and make up to 2x on each customer, but this would quickly become unsustainable because there simply is not enough cable in the world to do that, and make customers will not be using their full capacity 99% of the time anyway. Instead, the companies "oversell" their capacity by advertising a certain capacity to customers, but then capping the total transfer so that the customers cannot operate at peak capacity 100% of the time, since there is not space for that many electrons on the fiber optic cables.

Amazon charges $0.1 per gb transferred. In bulk, IP transit from hurricane electric can cost as little as $0.50 per mbps.

If you operate a low bandwidth site on Amazon, and you transfer 1 mbps for an entire month, that totals to 155.52 gigabits, or 19 gigabytes. You pay $1.90, but Amazon only pays $0.50. If you transfer at a consistent rate of 1 gbps, you total 324 terabytes of transfer, which costs you $3,240 @ 0.01/gb (I think that's their bulk price?). Amazon, meanwhile, only pays $500.

Lots of people don't know this is how the hosting industry works, and Amazon is gouging the shit out of them on price. Lots of companies paying for the convenience of "the cloud" are getting ripped off. For high bandwidth sites, it's far more cost effective to colocate at a datacenter and buy the IP transit yourself.

I'm sure Amazon offers custom transit pricing to big customers, but you need to transfer a ton of bandwidth to get that, and by then you're already getting ripped off anyway.

You're quite right here, with two exceptions:

1) Fibre transmits photons, not electrons. 2) The fundamental infrastructure limits aren't the cable themselves, but the equipment at either end. This technology improves every year, permitting the same cables to transfer more data. This is why installing fibre through the streets is such a good investment: it scales up over time, without having to dig it up and replace it.

Also, the issue you touched on with customers sharing the same bandwidth is called "contention", and it's possible to determine the "contention ratio" (i.e. how many people are sharing a unit of bandwidth) for ISPs (at least, it is in the UK).

Last I checked, in the UK, the contention was always better on DSL services than cable; but the maximum bandwidth and minimum latency on cable is correspondingly better. Though I've not checked the Openreach FTTC offering, which I imagine has a better contention at the moment due to a smaller customer base.

Same where I live (Belgium), typical limit is around 150 gig.

Isn't Belgium notoriously bad when it comes to internet service? I remember hearing that a decade ago. 150GB is really low, unless it's some crazy cheap deal.

Deutsche Telekom has been making noises about instituting a cap at some point in the coming years, but it's still no problem to get 50Mbit VDSL with no long-term contract and no cap through resellers like 1&1.

> Isn't Belgium notoriously bad when it comes to internet service? I remember hearing that a decade ago. 150GB is really low, unless it's some crazy cheap deal.

Belgium is sooo backward for Internet. When I used to live there 7 years ago, prices were like twice the price of what you could get in France and my ADSL contract would only get 10 Gb per month, and I had to pay 5 euros to get 5 Gb more of data. The total ripoff. I'm so glad I left.

I was on the same plan. To top it all off the ISP was named Skynet.

For some reason, i can't reply on the comment below, so i'm doing it here.

We don't have crappy internet service when it comes to Telenet in terms of speed. The competition (DLS) is not stable on a lot of places.

All of them have caps on the internet and are very expensive when looking at our neighboured countries.

But then again, everything is expensive and everyone has a monopoly here in some sector...

The governement has financial intrest (stocks) in the telecom companies. So that won't change soon.

This is awful, 1 game on Steam can weight 40 Gb now (see Injustice), here in Russia I pay only 12.5 EU/month for 30 Mbit/s and unlimited traffic. I hope telecoms won't start reimplementing traffic caps.

germany is still unmetered and the last attempt of Deutsche Telekom to introduce a cap resulted in a huge backslash. For now we are save, but i have the feeling it won't last forever.

I think the worst we have is Kabel Deutschland, they say in their ToS they'll slow filesharing services down to 100kbit/s for the day if you reach 10GB on that day with any kind of traffic. But as far as I know that limit is not enforced.

I ran some tests a few months back on how much bandwidth I use up while watching Twitch. What I found is that if I streamed Twitch 24/7 that I'd hit something like 1.2 TB down in a month.

By that logic, even just 3 hours a day would be 150 GB down a month.

Deleted comment

Sorry; wasn't trying to make that point at all. Instead, I was agreeing that I also was surprised with how much bandwidth Twitch takes up.

Ah, sorry. Too much time on the internet, I'm starting to read everything too cynically. I'll delete my comment responding to yours, since it doesn't add anything to the discussion and misrepresents what you were trying to say.

Responses like this are why I still come back to HN. Thanks for keeping this place pleasant.

Data caps are the only thing that makes sense. Nobody can deliver 'unlimited' data, and it just ends up being trolling the users.

Instead they should gradually deprioritize the connection/lower the speed, and allow you buying additional GB's.

I get that email pretty much every month now, nice thing about Cox is they don't do anything if they have to send it out. It's really just a notification.

Shouldn't people be throttled though? It seems like over the last few years there has been a huge spike in consumer video, and as far as I have seen people aren't paying much more.

This had been in the cards for a long time now. Justin.tv was a huge liability since there were so many streams running pirated content. They were really smart in acknowledging the success of video game streaming the platform was having and focusing their efforts there. Honestly one of the better pivots I have seen.

I think they are a really smart company, it will be interesting to see what happens post Google.

Was re-reading "Why TV Lost" essay by PG (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696), which seemed inspired by Justin.tv. A lot of the points in the essay from 5 years ago were really telling, including the role of piracy in the user experience.

One interesting excerpt: "The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications... This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers."

> Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else

I've never seen anyone completely write IBM and Microsoft out of computing history by such absurd degree as this.

Or Apple/Aldus/Adobe for that matter.

"Nerds" got them because at the time computers could only do the things nerds wanted them to.

It makes perfect sense since they weren't really interesting to go after (no money ) and now with the potential for a huge acquisition they need to reduce exposure to lawsuits from content companies that see a gigantic treasure chest almost ready to pop open.

Is there any money in twitch except through acquisition?

There's also subscriptions. People will pay $5 to subscribe to a channel for a month, half of which goes to Twitch (other half to the streamer).

In addition to just subscribing to 1 channel, people can also subscribe to "Twitch Turbo," with gives all the money to Twitch.

Top twitch streamers can pull 6 figures a year. I don't know what the bototm line for twitch looks like though.

Advertising and partnering with big gaming contests can generate real revenue.

game publishers also have paid twitch for front-page visibility during release hype.

I have a feeling they pay quite a bit.

Not really. The networking costs to stream to that many users is huge. Google has the infrastructure to change the cost structure but it only works with that kind of scale.

Ads, subscriptions and merchandise all come to mind.

Kind of sucks access to old videos is gone. I remember watching a lot of Arab spring and occupy wall street streams live as they happened on the site. It's a shame to lose those videos and the interesting historical info in them.

The Archive project has been busy getting these as quickly as possible. https://archive.org/details/justintv You may find a lot of those videos have been saved. I think there was a limit on which videos were actually saved as those with no views or only few were not selected.

Videos with more than 10 views were downloaded. In addition, many videos that people asked to be saved were downloaded.

Awesome, thanks everyone who helped save the videos!

Fear not! https://archive.org/details/justintv

... however, it doesn't have absolutely everything. Justin.tv had so much data that even the Internet Archive and Archive Team had issues coping with it in such a short term.

EDIT: Ah damnit, ejr was faster.

Actually it was a matter of it being a silly amount of terabytes once you get to videos with <9 views.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/476064989879349248

I feel nostalgic, in a weird way. With Google Glass coming into the world, it's nice to remember there was a time when filming your day required a pioneer spirit and a DIY rig.

I remember this interview when Justin was just getting started...

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/06/06/a-conversation-with-j...

I remember in the first weeks of JTV when the crew would hold a weekly BBQ at their apartment, so that people would have something interesting to watch. It was fun to go up there and joke with Justin about his shenanigans for the week while watching Kyle build ever smaller portable rigs.

I'm glad that that crazy idea ("I'm going to live stream my life and people will watch!") has turned into the best live streaming gaming site on the internet.

I used to visit justin.tv a lot in the early days, they used to have more interesting people broadcasting but the quality declined over the last 5 years. A lot of the more premium channels/brands broadcast on other sites.

This is reflected in the traffic, just look at the decline from a peak in late 2009. Looking at this graph, it's no real surprise that they are shutting it down:

https://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv#!traffic (click all below the graph)

They have done really well to develop the gaming side on twitch.

Sounds like Twitch is slimming down after Google buy. Smart move. Google cares about the demographics of Twitch a lot more, I'd imagine.

Has the acquisition actually been announced yet? All I can find are articles that say it is "confirmed", but with no link to the announcement.

No, it's purely rumors at this point.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I actually switched the tense of my statement a few times with edits. There have been at least 2-3 leaks of the deal, FWIW.

Did the companies Twitch and justin.tv have anything to do with each other, other than their shared ancestry?

Yes. Same parent company. The parent company was renamed to Twitch earlier this year. Twitch was a part of the justin.tv site, but it became popular enough to warrant its own site. Twitch.tv continued to boom while justin.tv stagnated much like the other streaming sites.

They were essentially the same company. The parent company, Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch.tv earlier this year.

I understand there was lots of pirated content on justin.tv, but I am surprised that focusing on streaming live video games is better in the long term then focusing on live content in general.

I see the live content market with more possibilities ... live events, reality shows ...etc.

I'm not an expert on the subject, can someone enlighten me?

Third party live streaming of events doesn't really exist. Most major live events (e.g. sports) are streamed using the right holder's own systems. Video games is one category where this isn't the case. Twitch has partnerships to stream many of the major esports tournaments.

Well, the easy answer is this supposed deal between google and twitch.

Twitch as a service has special value because it aids in curation and discovery of video game streams. The fact that you can browse by game, browse by streamer, follow streamers, they all work in the video game streaming environment because of how people watch, and how streamers perform.

Things like live events, reality shows, other live content is a bit trickier to categorize and manage than games. You can't have the same "titles list" as you do with video game streaming. All you can do is something like notifications to followers and subscriptions etc.

The thing is, youtube does these things. If google is buying twitch, then youtube's live service and justin.tv do not serve distinct purposes, and youtube is probably a better platform (and better equipped to deal with piracy) than justin.tv was.

You wouldn't want to just absorb twitch into youtube because twitch as a curator and means of discovery is better than youtube, specifically for video games. But justin.tv didn't serve that purpose well.

Specialization is better than generalization for everyone but those who become hegemonic. If I come to Justin.tv I think "I don't know what I might find here (short of looking for pirated content)" and on Twitch I know "I'm going to see League of Legends".

It would be a bigger win to be the "Youtube of live streaming" but a harder win. Twitch ended up with a MASSIVE specialized win in online gaming, and they went with what was working.

> I am surprised that focusing on streaming live video games is better in the long term then focusing on live content in general.

> I'm not an expert on the subject, can someone enlighten me?

It probably helps to see live streaming of video games in the context of pro sports.

This was surprising to me as well, until I heard friends, in particular younger ones and children speak about it. Professional videogaming tournaments are big and serious business.

And with that, I can also imagine how watching non-pro/non-top gamers making with funny commentary is in fact a lot more fun than watching amateur sports players do the same :)

Live events and live content are legally tricky. First, because there are usually multiple rights-holders to the various content being performed, and second, because a rebroadcast of that content is often deemed to be a performance or exhibition in its own right. That means lawyers, and licenses, and paperwork, and the exchange of currency. Tangentially, there's also the issue of getting releases from people who appear in the video, and things of that nature.

Live content is a huge opportunity. Content is often a tangled web.

Live streaming content has huge potential but the justin.tv brand is pretty tarnished at this point, I can't see many big brands/name choosing to broadcast there. They would need a complete relaunch and name change I think.

With the experiment of streaming Steve Aoki on twitch it wouldn't surprise me if they launched a dedicated branded site for live music at some point. Google may want to keep that stuff on youtube though.

By tarnished, do you mean that it is an old brand, or that something bad happened to the brand that tarnished it?

It just had a increasingly unprofessional/low quality image that in addition to the many pirated tv streams as other people have mentioned, attracted many teenage girls with low quality cameras and viewers asking them to 'show feet' and other demands. This quote from this fast company article sums it up pretty well:

"By last summer, its once-thriving community had dwindled to a ghost town populated by puppy cams, eccentrics--like the stoner who filmed himself taking bong hits--and a few lonely lifecasters. Mostly young women, they tend to sit, static, in front of a webcam, rambling about their interior lives to a tiny audience of leering commenters."

http://www.fastcompany.com/1839300/many-pivots-justintv-how-...

I would think they want generic live content to go through Youtube now.

DNA Lounge used Justin.tv. JWZ’s reaction here: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html

What are the major, general-purpose livestreaming options now? Ustream? Google Hangouts? What else?

I've never tried it myself, but I believe you can livestream on youtube.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2474026?hl=en

When I tried it it worked pretty well, except the stream lagged really far behind. It was usually a couple minutes behind live for me

Twitch can be 30 seconds to a minute behind so these days having extensive difference between the broadcaster and viewers seems common, sadly.

What other sites offer similar TV streams like JTV did?

I have used JTV for marathon watching of so many popular TV shows for the past five years.

I may not really be watching, but when working on your latest start-up or idea it was always good to be watching marathons of my favorite show in the background.

This is also what I used it for, watching Star Trek TNG streams while waiting for software to compile with General Grin and other custom comedy segments the channel operators made between eps. The whole point was socialTV where you could lol about how ridiculous some of the characters were with other fans in chat. The ancient aliens channel was also comedy gold, his hair gets bigger with every season.

DId anybody try this? Not a bad catch. "Goodbye to Justin.tv, Welcome to TwitCasting.tv" http://twitcasting.tv/?justin=1

Why is this being downvoted? This is how I used JTV for the past five years and I'm sure tons of others here did too.

People were saying this is why JTV was shut down, rampant copyright infringement.

Probably, but it was an amazing site due to all the marathon copyrighted TV shows you can just go and tune into.

Where am I supposed to get a similar service now? I'll never pay for cable TV again!

You should still pay for the content you consume. This is why these streaming sites get shut down so quickly. Watching a stream is no different than torrenting it or other means of infringing. You're watching a TV show without the rights holders getting any money. If you don't want the rights holders to get any of your money (whether it's because you cannot afford to pay, or do not want to pay), you simply should not watch the show, not find a free way around the system.

Well where can I watch and pay for a JTV like service on the INternet.

Answer you can not and copyright does not want to disrupt their horrible cable TV business model.

JTV was awesome and will be sorely missed! Aereo too and hey I paid for that.

Camarades.com is back in business and will remain alive as long as I can support it. It's older than justin.tv by a long shot and I don't have any intention of shutting it down. Acquisitions, it is safe to say, are not in the cards.

YouNow and Tinychat are the ones left that I know about. BlogTV was big but closed down and was acquired by YouNow.

I'm working on a general-purpose streaming site, but with a twist in how broadcasting works. Not quite enough for a 'Show HN' yet however.

Would be interested in hearing more about your project. Couldn't find any contact info for you, my email is in my profile. I do a lot of streaming work, and enjoy talking shop.

There's also http://livestream.com

Twitch.tv (justin.tv's parent company) is one even though its gaming focused. People stream non-gaming stuff (including dev-streams) quite often.

Actually, on Twitch you can only stream gaming related content. It does include programming, but only if you are programming a game (or related tool or such).

At one time I had good luck with a streaming app called Bambuser. I switched from Ustream because the latter had issues (at the time) dealing with poor connectivity.

Self hosted RTP stream?

Spreecast (www.spreecast.com)

http://kageshi.com

You can do livestreaming on YouTube.

I guess this was inevitable after Twitch was acquired.

"Your account is now closed, and you will be unable to access any settings or content"

They announced the end of archiving of videos a few months ago. So there's nothing really to get off of your account.

There's a lot of talk about how this is due to the google acquisition, but if you paid any attention to twitch / justin, this is the logical extension of the slow justin.tv sunset that has been going on for the past few years.

Removed from TWiT:

* Episode with mention: http://twit.tv/show/tech-news-2night/144

* Wiki history: http://wiki.twit.tv/w/index.php?title=Stream_URLs&diff=prev&...

This is sad nostalgia. It was 2006-2007 when I was in the process if moving from Miami to San Francisco. I remember finding out about Justin on a cnet interview (I think). He had a setup of some cameras in his hat. I remember quite fondly just watching him walk around the streets of SF and getting a real life view of what my future city looked like.

I first heard about Justin.tv in an Amazon EC2 case study. They were one the the pioneers on the platform and laid out a blueprint on elastic scaling to handle their encoding. I found it very interesting and inspirational.

The idea of lifecasting had been around for a while though I think. Josh Harris comes to mind, but maybe even earlier?

Not really surprising, considering how outdated their site was (visually, at least).

Edit: Users with accounts can migrate them to Twitch.TV here: http://link.twitch.tv/switchaccount

"Twitch is site for gaming-related content only. "

Just wanted to point out a typo in the copy.

Not a typo, their had their Russian PR manager issue this release.

So it's not a typo because it was written by a Russian?

It's a joke; Russian doesn't have articles like English does. The omission of the article in the sentence that the OP pointed out makes it sound like it could have been spoken by a Russian character out of a Hollywood movie.

In my experience, all ESL Russians speak like Russian characters in Hollywood movies. I do find the dropped articles to be quite amusing.

But now that you explained it's no longer funny.

I would have never thought when Twitch first was a side project that it would become as big as it is. I don't know if it's luck, skill, or good timing, but it's really amazing what they achieved.

All of those. Gaming has been steadily growing for a long time now and has reached a "major player" status, so the timing is good. They're obviously a very skilled group of people. And finally, great achievements require some luck.

This one was shocking to read. At first I thought the company is dying, but they basically switch the focus to twitch. I still remember when Justin's stream was all the rage. What a great time!

You could see this coming when they gave everyone 7 days to back up their archives before they would be deleted. I'm sure most of their employable employees jumped ship since then.

Why would they jump ship? Twitch.tv has been booming for the past couple years. If anything, they were just already moved to the twitch team.

This has little to do with the viability of the company/site and more to do with getting rid of what is basically a generalized, predecessor version of their already highly successful specialized streaming site.

Most stayed & most will get the benefit of the Google acquire =)

What are you talking about? Ever heard of Twitch?

Can I retrieve my videos? Unfortunately, videos on Justin.tv are no longer accessible for download. Video archiving and VODs were removed on June 15, 2014.

Were people given advance notice on this?

Yes, one week's notice.

Seems abrupt. Would be nice to give users a couple of weeks or a month to download their content.

Edit: never mind, looks like they gave plenty of notice.

They made an announcement a while ago as I recall, I think it even made the front page of HN as well.

EDIT: Yep, heres the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826313

I will miss endless repeats of the entire corpus of Stargate episodes. Really a great way to escape and get away for a while.

Im gonna miss "The Office" stream.

Would've been nice if he gave heads up at YC Hacks or something.

End of an era

...My cousins had just bought a membership...

  "I'm an active Pro Account User, will I be refunded?

  Yes. You should have already received an email communicating the cancellation and refund process."

great, thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com