How Justin.TV's Live Video System Was Born | Hacker News Reader

How Justin.TV's Live Video System Was Born

gizmodo.com

31 pointslclinden7 comments

Justin.TV is surely great engineering project to work on. There are tons of cool technical challenges and elegant solutions (creatively laying out video frames onto RTP to deal with high packet loss, for instance). Must be alot of fun to be a part of it.

One thing I don't get, however, is monetization strategy. Sell camera/software kits to Justing wannabees? License the tech to TV networks? Give away the technology to all video-bloggers who cares and sell ads on their blogs?

This one's obvious. Product placement. High engagement means high advertising dollars.

It's great to get a glimpse of how it works, but I was a little surprised to see how bulky the backpack machine is.

Could the justin setup eveolve to use something like the Gumstix "Way Smalls" computers -- http://www.gumstix.com/waysmalls.html -- instead?

We started with a fairly tiny computer, similar to the Gumstix.

I had a development setup on the bench that was running on a mini-itx board. PG convinced us we needed to launch the second my prototype worked, so I literally designed a case around the bench setup and stuffed it into a backpack.

Justin now carries a 2 lb Sony VAIO that runs Windows XP. The technology is simple enough that anyone can use it, and soon they'll be able to.

Well, it makes sense from a marketing perspective (i.e. you can tell people who are interested "all you need is a laptop, plus the camera we'll send you", etc.).

But have you defined a minimum spec for that computer?

I'm just wondering if someone wanted to go the Gumstix route instead of a laptop, would it be possible?

'... I'm just wondering if someone wanted to go the Gumstix route instead of a laptop, would it be possible? ...'

It is, if you are Steve Mann ~ http://www.eyetap.org ... but having said that it's not easy ~ http://www.eyetap.org/resources/faq/faq_building_eyetap.html

All hail your awesome hacking skills.

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