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The 24/7 cams
Peter Sellis worked as a product lead at Ustream, one of the first live streaming companies, in a golden age of streaming made possible by higher bandwidth. Livestream and Justin TV were its neighbors. At the time there were about three 24/7 cams: the puppies, an eagle cam showing the birth of baby eagles in Decorah, Iowa, and Jason Calacanis broadcasting This Week in Startups, since he was the only person who could afford a broadcasting rig.
Why people watched
The puppies grew up and acted crazy on camera day and night. Many viewers kept the stream running in the background while they worked, headphones on, because listening to the puppies was soothing. Emails poured in from people writing that the stream had saved their lives.
What it taught
Ustream still counts as a failure, because it should have focused on gaming the way Justin TV did on its way to becoming Twitch. Live streaming remains an uncracked product category: technically challenging and quite expensive. The puppy cam taught plenty about consumer products anyway.
Why was live streaming so expensive?
A live video stream cannot be stored and copied the way a file can, so the data has to be encoded and sent to every viewer as it happens. The bandwidth bill grows with each additional viewer. Content delivery networks, which place servers near viewers, were built to spread that load. Streaming companies in the late 2000s paid for this capacity before they had reliable ways to earn revenue from it.
Why do people leave ambient streams running?
Slow, unhurried video has a long record of drawing crowds. In 2009 the Norwegian broadcaster NRK aired a seven-hour train journey from Bergen to Oslo, and more than a million people watched at least part of it. NRK followed it with other slow television broadcasts, including a multi-day ship voyage. The format spread to other countries and to streaming services.
How did Justin.tv become Twitch?
Justin.tv launched in 2007 as a site where co-founder Justin Kan broadcast his life from a camera, and it then opened to other users. Its gaming category grew faster than the rest. The founders spun that category out as Twitch in 2011. Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for about 970 million dollars.
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