7. “When will I be able to watch JTV on my iPhone?”
“Are you working on an iPhone app?”
“How can I watch my friends JTV channel on my iPod Touch?”
“How long until you guys have an iPhone app?”
“You should make an app!”
“I want Justin.tv on my iPhone”
11. Past Broadcasts
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12. Past Broadcasts
Featured Videos
Chat Profile
Following
Search
Live Video Twitter Chat
Messages
Follow Badges
Highlighting
Email Sharing
Create Account
Categories
Facebook Sharing Sign In Twitter Sharing
13. Live Video
Chat
Follow
Search
Categories
Email Sharing
Featured Videos
Caleb Elston VP of products at Justin.tv. I oversee all of our web and mobile products. Working with our designers and engineers to curate a great experience for our users.
Caleb Elston VP of products at Justin.tv. I oversee all of our web and mobile products. Working with our designers and engineers to curate a great experience for our users.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
We got many requests over email, talking with users on the site and on our weekly Founder Chat live broadcast.
After getting so much feedback we decided in August to build an app
Once we decided we were going to build. Had to pick features.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
Lots of features on JTV. Ways to communicate chat or private messages, share on the major social networks, view past broadcasts, and many others.
But we focused on what would be best for when you want to see what your friend is broadcasting or watch someone playing the latest Starcraft beta.
And so we came to focus on a small set of features we wanted to execute on and were most essential to the experience. Live video. Chat, and a way to discover video.
There were 3 main challenges
We wanted to make the app that users would love. Use wherever they were and didn’t get in there way.
Make it look awesome on 3G and Wifi
Have it load quickly and have low latency. Unlike YouTube, we can’t buffer video. It has to flow every single second. That’s hard.
We spent 2 months working on sketches and mocking up wireframes. Then a month on the visual design and pixel perfect mocks.
Tips Read the HIG from Apple. Sweat the details. The structure of your app is critical to whether or not it will eventually “feel right”.
We spent 2 months working on sketches and mocking up wireframes. Reading the HIG from Apple.
The structure of your app is critical to whether or not it will eventually “feel right”.
Sweat the details. Make sure it feels like an iPhone app. Make sure the people working on your app USE iPhones. Build it for iPhone. The fluidity of scrolling, the loading indicators, the way text goes white when it is selected.
One such detail was how we would indicate to users that new chat messages were coming in, without covering the video. Looking around we realized apple had already solved this...
They solved it with the SMS and Mail app. So now when a chat message comes in, this little indicator pops up. Simple and expected by users.
Once we had the design humming along we brought in our video engineers. Reconcile our video formats would not play on iPhone.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
We support all sorts of video formats and resolutions. From basic webcam quality to 1080P 10Mbit streams from an Xbox360. We had to find a way to transcode all of our video into Apple’s chosen H.264.
So we spoke with a bunch of vendors who provide transcoding solutions...
Problem was
They wanted around $250k for custom hardware and additional yearly licensing fees.
Needless to say we passed.
One of our video engineers said we could build it, and started down the path of building our own solution.
We wanted to allow any stream on our site to play on the iphone. Anyone could broadcast on the site and see themselves on their iPhone.
Massive amount of video would need to be transcoded. Any stream on the site would be viewable on iPhone. You start broadcasting and you can watch it on your iPhone.
Needed to keep up and be able to transcode even our highest quality streams in real time.
And we wanted it to fit our existing architecture so we could add more commodity servers we already use.
In early january we got live video from our system working on the iPhone reliably.
Private beta with 50 passionate JTV users
Fixed a ton of bugs and submitted to Apple. Very exciting day
Then my phone rang
They liked the app. Wanted to make sure we had low quality stream for EDGE.
That day we began the process of creating a companion stream, effectively doubling the amount of video we had to transcode.
Apple was great to work with and in the end the app was better for it.
Launched on March 22. Got some press.
Launched on March 22. Got some press.
Launched on March 22. Got some press.
Launched on March 22. Got some press.
Launched on March 22. Got some press.
60k users started streaming video the first day.
#1 in 20 Geos
Here is a chart of the user adoption for the app since we launched.
We are no hard at work on brining live video broadcasting to the app using Apple’s latest API’s in iOS4