

Surprise, Justin.TV Builds Own CDN To Cut Costs, Improve Performance - mwseibel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/surprise-justintv-is-actually-a-real-technology-company/#comment-1925058

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emmett
So, technically, the software we've written is a distributed flash video
distribution system, of the type one could use to run a CDN.

But "distributed flash video system" is like 20 characters longer and a lot
harder to say than CDN.

It runs partly on EC2, partly on our own servers right now, and relies on the
properties of neither.

It's much, much cheaper than buying software from Adobe or Wowza or paying a
CDN.

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iamelgringo
Are you going to offer streaming services to other companies?

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emmett
It's still under too much development and too unstable to offer an outside
API, but it's something we're very much considering.

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plinkplonk
Justin.TV seems to have a very interesting startup model. An apparently
trivial "outer" application which needs a good deal of innovation "under the
covers" to pull off, which is where the real competitive edge comes from.
Pulls in a different direction from how most people parse "build what users
want".

I wonder how they pitched it to YC (and other investors).

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vlad
>> I wonder how they pitched it to YC (and other investors).

AFAIK, Justin and a friend took part in the first YC session with a web
calendar called Kiko, which they sold on eBay for 5 or 6 figures to a media
company after Google came out with theirs. They started working on Justin.tv
to have a product in a market which didn't exist at the time, mobile streaming
video, to have a better chance of survival.

I believe Justin et al have been working on Justin.tv even before Google
purchased YouTube, and are funded by investors closely linked to YCombinator
who enjoyed his YCombinator calendar startup.

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aston
_"funded by investors closely linked to YCombinator"_

And maybe a little from YC partners, too...

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danielha
YC is the closest link to YC, smarty.

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rontr
I don't think running your own software on EC2 qualifies as building a CDN.

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reitzensteinm
It just uses EC2/S3 to push off excess bandwidth.

Bandwidth from a company like Alpha Red works out to about 3 cents/gigabyte if
you buy it in 50 megabit per second chunks, or 6 cents/gigabyte if you buy it
in 4tb per month chunks.

S3 is 18 cents/gigabyte.

Megabit per second is cheaper if you can keep it at 50% utilization, so
baseline bandwidth is actually quite cheap. You'd be crazy to be that
bandwidth intensive and pay 18 cents/gig for all your traffic. It adds up
quickly.

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ntoshev
Cost saving alone doesn't qualify for a CDN either. You need geographical
distribution.

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reitzensteinm
I'm not saying it qualifies as a CDN - I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - just that
it's more complex than simply putting stuff up on S3, and based on the info in
the article, the above is my guess as to what they're doing. You don't get 1/4
of a penny per hour of flv by building a worldwide network of servers.

Well, perhaps if you were as big as Google you could. I don't know enough
about the economics of scale. But you'd have to be doing some serious volume
at the local internet exchanges.

By the way, I was kind of thinking out loud because I'm in the same position:

[http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/rocksolida...](http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/rocksolidarcade.com?site0=rocksolidarcade.com&site1=justin.tv&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=6m&size=Medium)

Bandwidth is averaging above 1mb per person (and growing - the new games are
bigger than Stunt Pilot and people play more the more we have), which is
probably quite a bit less than justin.tv, but still costly. I definitely won't
leave the US for bandwidth, but I'll probably end up with a mixture of
baseline servers, gigabyte per month servers and a mirror of static content
ready on S3 (as well as a static version of the site), just in case too many
of my servers go down at once or we get a massive traffic spike.

Maybe then I'll get a story on TC about how I've created a "CDN", and hey, I
wouldn't email them saying remove the story, it's innaccurate. :)

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axod
My understanding of a CDN was:

You build your own geographically diverse network. Servers in each
country/state/area. You put in very high speed links between each node.

When a user comes to get something from you, you redirect them to the node
that is closest to them (Either geographically, or in terms of hops/ping
time).

Is this not what CDN means typically?

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ntoshev
Yes. But TechCrunch apparently doesn't know it.

You don't need a server in each country, just "close to your users". Like one
on the east coast, one on the west coast, one in Europe, and you don't care
about the rest of the world. But I am not sure Justin.tv has that.

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joshwa
Wow, are techcrunch comments the new youtube comments?

