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Wasnt that how twitch started? A sister company of JustinTV and then they closed JustinTV because it didnt make sense

by mx_03 3y ago

filoleg 3y ago
It started as JustinTV, but it wasn’t for adult content or anything. JustinTV started just as a single channel website showing the 24/7 irl livestream of one of the founders, Justin Kan. Then they slowly opened it up for others to be able to host their own livestream. Bit by bit, some people started streaming games rather than irl. Very quickly, gaming became the most popular thing to stream there and overtook most of the platform. JustinTV staff then spun-off gaming channels on JustinTV into its own new gaming-only platform, Twitch. For a while they were running side-by-side. But as Twitch started becoming more generalist and less gaming-only, yeah, it became clear there is no point in keeping JustinTV alive, if Twitch became their all encompassing superset of JustinTV. I think the main difference is that Twitch and JustinTV didn’t have that much of a boundary in terms of content as SFW/NSFW split would. Their difference was mostly thematic, so it made sense to them at the time to eventually pool it all into one streaming platform. But that’s where we currently are with the problem of what’s allowed in twitch and what isn’t. Unlike with SFW/NSFW separation, Twitch wasn’t created for the purpose of hosting content that wasn’t allowed on JustinTV. It was created because gaming started overwhelming any other content on JustinTV, and they wanted the original irl livestreaming content of JustinTV to not die due to it all being games. Games were allowed on JustinTV just fine before that. JustinTV was rendered truly pointless once Twitch introduced IRL and “just chatting” categories, as that was just essentially a “justintv section”. Note: not disagreeing with you, you are correct. Just wanted to provide a bit more nuance to how it went down, as well as some context for why I don’t think that their separation approach would have the same type of an outcome as a SFW/NSFW spin-off would.

Wasnt that how twitch started? A sister company of JustinTV and then they closed JustinTV because it didnt make sense

by mx_03 3y ago

Wasnt that how twitch started? A sister company of JustinTV and then they closed JustinTV because it didnt make sense

It started as JustinTV, but it wasn’t for adult content or anything. JustinTV started just as a single channel website showing the 24/7 irl livestream of one of the founders, Justin Kan. Then they slowly opened it up for others to be able to host their own livestream. Bit by bit, some people started streaming games rather than irl. Very quickly, gaming became the most popular thing to stream there and overtook most of the platform. JustinTV staff then spun-off gaming channels on JustinTV into its own new gaming-only platform, Twitch. For a while they were running side-by-side. But as Twitch started becoming more generalist and less gaming-only, yeah, it became clear there is no point in keeping JustinTV alive, if Twitch became their all encompassing superset of JustinTV. I think the main difference is that Twitch and JustinTV didn’t have that much of a boundary in terms of content as SFW/NSFW split would. Their difference was mostly thematic, so it made sense to them at the time to eventually pool it all into one streaming platform. But that’s where we currently are with the problem of what’s allowed in twitch and what isn’t. Unlike with SFW/NSFW separation, Twitch wasn’t created for the purpose of hosting content that wasn’t allowed on JustinTV. It was created because gaming started overwhelming any other content on JustinTV, and they wanted the original irl livestreaming content of JustinTV to not die due to it all being games. Games were allowed on JustinTV just fine before that. JustinTV was rendered truly pointless once Twitch introduced IRL and “just chatting” categories, as that was just essentially a “justintv section”. Note: not disagreeing with you, you are correct. Just wanted to provide a bit more nuance to how it went down, as well as some context for why I don’t think that their separation approach would have the same type of an outcome as a SFW/NSFW spin-off would.