

Justin.tv for iPhone Racks Up 355,000 Downloads in First Week - evansolomon
http://mashable.com/2010/03/31/justintv-iphone/

======
axod
It's a free app? Seems like they could have charged $4.99 for it, and still
sold about as many... Wonder what the decision went like to make it free.

~~~
evansolomon
The difference between $0 and $5 is pretty huge. We would have sold some
(maybe even lots) at $5, but about as many? I can't imagine that.

The decision to make it free was a result of the market (how much other apps
cost) and our goals (revenue, usage, branding, growth, etc).

~~~
mattmaroon
I would guess you wouldn't even sell 5% as many at $5. You're in a land-grab
now, it would be nuts to even think about charging. Even if you did sell that
many for $5, $1.5 million will end up small potatoes when the final chapter on
the live online streaming video book is written.

~~~
pavs
While what justin.tv does is interesting, lets not get over our heads already.
Youtube just needs to flick a switch to make most live video stream obsolete.

~~~
abstractbill
If by "flick a switch" you mean "re-architect their entire system to make low-
latency highly-scaleable live video streaming cost effective", then I guess I
agree with you. That's a pretty _big_ switch though.

~~~
pavs
In case you don't know youtube already provides live streaming for certain
events in US politics. They also recently stated streaming live domestic
cricket event with an estimated viewer ship of ~50 million people at any given
time (<http://www.youtube.com/user/IPL> YouTube don't show view counts on live
events).

About being cost effective. You highly underestimate Google/YouTube's ability
to throw money around with no short-terms shavings or profit interest.

The only legitimate reason thats preventing YouTube from rolling out streaming
(that I can think of) is having an effective way of preventing adult and
copyright material streaming, which is quite common at justin.tv (I would
argue that it is the main source of their traffic).

You can only do so much with software, you probably need manpower to
continuously monitor and prevent illegal activity, which is happening live.
The problem is not technical, the problem is legal and management.

I predict YouTube Live stream for all will happen sometime before the end of
this year.

~~~
abstractbill
YouTube has relied on Akamai to provide the streaming infrastructure for all
of its live events so far, and as far as we know it has no live streaming
infrastructure of its own. Akamai costs a _lot_ of money - we actually
overflow to them when our own infrastructure gets overloaded, but we try not
to do that too often as it's prohibitively expensive.

~~~
pavs
"Live video is just something that we've always wanted to do, we've never had
the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do
it this year." - Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube in 2008.

I think they are relying on Akamai till their own setup is ready to go. I
think the argument that Youtube don't/can't have live streaming infrastructure
is quite silly.

