The Truman Show meets Web 2.0: Former Kiko coworkers launch Justin.tv

Posted by Richard White Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:54:00 GMT

Congratulations to the Justin.tv crew of Justin, Emmett, Kyle and Michael for a successful late night launch and coinciding TechCrunch coverage. I had the pleasure of working the Justin and Emmett on Kiko and I’ve got nothing but positive memories of that experience and am lucky to still consider those guys good friends. Now I’ll be honest, when they told me about their next big thing I was a bit shocked, I mean, doing a 24/7 online reality tv show is as much of a 180 as you can do from the pragmatic world of Web 2.0 calendaring. But they were really passionate about the idea and, in this day and age, that counts for a lot. I didn’t end up signing on for the Justin.tv experience because of my existing commitment to SlimTimer and the fact that the success of Justin.tv is predicated on marketing, having quality content, and video streaming servers moreso than web design (unlike Kiko).

Coincidentally we all separately migrated to San Francisco and the guys now live less than 10 blocks away so I get to see a good deal of the J.tv team. Note that all four guys share a two bedroom apartment and have 1-4 extra visitors at any given time. It’s been exciting to be part of their private beta and watch the project and its members mature. I’ve watched Justin become more adept at design and CSS, marveled at Kyle’s improvements to the camera setup and video quality, seen Emmett put together their own content delivery network using EC2 when existing providers proved to be too expensive or too unreliable, and salivated as Mike worked his kitchen magic putting on a delicious gourmet meal for all the local startups every Thursday (Oh and all the biz dev stuff he’s done like securing cool sponsors and such)

It has also been an interesting way to get up with my friends without making a phone call: “Oh I can see that Justin still isn’t even dressed to go out, I can wait another 15 mins before heading over there” or “Where the heck are they heading now… ahh Union St. I’ll head them off at the pass”.

Now that they’re finally live there are a couple of subplots I’ll be following:

Can they survive the “First Day TechCrunch Effect” and keep their videos feeds up? I’m pretty sure they didn’t plan for the TC article to come out at 1 AM PST so it’ll be a long, Bawls-powered night for those guys.
Can they maintain a high level of interesting content or will the whole Truman Show like appeal drive uptake regardless of content quality?
Could Justin.tv be the fourth horseman of the Web 2.0 Apocalypse as some have predicted? (Was Kiko the first?)
What are the chances of Justin finding romance with a camera strapped to his head?
And the big question is… how can I use the video feed to gain the upper hand on Justin for Poker night?

Good luck guys, I’ll be watching.