Kiko guys back as reality tv stars

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/kiko-guys-back-as-reality-tv-stars/

by gaz • 19 years ago

75 25 19 years ago

staunch• 19 years ago

It sounds like they're going to shotgun together some EVDO cards so they have enough bandwidth for a high quality stream? I wonder if they've created some kind of proxy to split up the stream and reassemble it with some hacked up cam-driver or something. Hopefully it's not too complicated a system.

Very interesting if it works out. Latency with EVDO isn't great, but mostly good enough. WiFi is pretty useless for mobile broadcasting because it's not very mobile.

zkinion• 19 years ago

Yeah, that can expand alot in the future with wimax.

rms2• 19 years ago

Fun idea. I like it.

brett2• 19 years ago

Yeah. Surprisingly compelling. Especially in the context of YC News given that right now it's a bunch of guys monitoring a recently released site that's getting a bunch of traffic.

rms2• 19 years ago

Coincidentally, justin.tv succeeded in creating the only Web 2.0 chat room on the internet.

joshwa3• 19 years ago

"chat powered by Lingr"

http://www.lingr.com/

papersmith• 19 years ago

Looks like a public version of campfire. http://www.campfirenow.com/

joshwa3• 19 years ago

argh, I've just upvoted and now there's nothing I can do to undo it...

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4971

joshwa3• 19 years ago

whoa! where'd those 59 points come from?

danw3• 19 years ago

I initially thought this was a silly idea but I'm now strangly addicted to it.. Why live my own life when I can watch someone else!

danw3• 19 years ago

Whoah, as the viewer numbers climbed rapidly the quality of conversation in the chat quickly dropped off.

I've seen this link posted far too many times in there: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

pg• 19 years ago

Their logo, incidentally, was done by Alexis Ohanian, who invented the Reddit alien.

nickb• 19 years ago

Superb idea! This is the future of broadcasting! They will be able to license this platform and allow others to broadcast the same way. This will also allow people, who lead boring lives, to live through others. Reality TV is a big hit because of this and it looks like justin.tv is a huge step forward towards even a more intimate experience. I have a feeling that in the near future, some people will live someone else's lives. Scary!

sethjohn• 19 years ago

Product placement will get them generating cash pretty quick. Could be difficult to scale up though, presuming there's only one Justin. What's the chance they've managed to file a patent for this as a 'business concept'?

danw3• 19 years ago

Quite a few news.YC users are in http://justin.tv/#justin.tv.1

python_kiss• 19 years ago

Yeah, I love the site. I got to say "hi to Jessica and Paul" and Justin mentioned my site, Shuzak.com, to them live! I am watching YC dinner atm (Paul's riding Trevor's invention) :D

This site definitely has potential to generate revenue. They could embed video advertisements or use sponsored food or cellphones, etc. Justin.tv might fail, but its model could be successfully extended to other reality tv shows. I believe that is the direction they plan on taking :)

danielha• 19 years ago

They mentioned "live polling" a few minutes ago. That would be way cool. Interactive entertainment at its finest.

notabel• 19 years ago

This is an interesting adaptation of the notion of glogging / moblogging; I have to wonder to what extent these guys were inspired by the much more theoretical work done with eyetaps (amazing technology, but not really scalable). The interesting thing to see will be whether, since this is meant to be outward-facing (as opposed glogging's introspective bent), it will suffer from the lack of editorial control. Basically, does a person's life have a high enough density of interesting content that it is worth watching? If the answer is yes, then there is definite potential for radical developments in social media.

\me wanders off to check Joi Ito's moblog.

Readmore• 19 years ago

This is crazy, it's like that movie EdTV, only geekier.

brett2• 19 years ago

This could be a good way to watch startup school if you didn't get in or could not make it.

zach• 19 years ago

The company that creates companies brings you the startup about being a startup. Wow.

floozyspeak• 19 years ago

Yawn! Hasn't this been done already? Hello Jennicam, livecam, youtube?! I mean sure its neat, and its a polished website, but long term sustainability? Is it sticky enough to have me glued in day in and day out? I give it 3 months before it taps out. I mean its no trueman show here folks and ya don't even empower folks along the way. Why not tell people how ya did it? Share some real insight. How exactally am I living through their lives.. by watching them sleep? I did that sleep study last month, it wasnt that fun really. This is basically a short term startup biz idea, take 4 guys that do stuff, slap cameras on them, watch them make more stuff. Now I'd give them a bit more huff if they at least connected themselves to ambient like devices, nabaztag, or ambient orb, or something else other than forcing me to go to a widget to see if they ate a bagel or not today.. i dunno.

jamongkad• 19 years ago

Dunno if I'm willing to invest my time to watch these guys. Is the ordinary joe willing to watch this as well??

nostrademons• 19 years ago

I watched the dinner and aftermath, including all the pizza prank calls and various other abuse. I didn't see an easily-accessible feedback link (note to other startup founders: include this), so I'll post my feedback here:

1. Congratulations. In two days, you have managed to create a community more fucked up than YouTube.

2. I started watching because of the outrageous stuff other viewers were doing. When you go to curb the abuse, be aware of this. Many of your viewers may be watching only because folks are doing stupid stuff like ordering pizza and making yCombinator pay for it. Lose the hassles and you may lose the audience.

3. Reality TV shows succeed because they're unreal. TV execs hype up and dramatize all sorts of conflict, because that's what gets viewers to tune in. Nobody wants to see an ordinary person's life, because it's boring.

4. Who do you want to be - Anna Nicole Smith or Paris Hilton. Your success in attracting viewers is proportional to how trashy you are willing to become. Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton remain media darlings because we can look at them and think "Wow, look how pathetic they are." It makes us feel good about ourselves. Unless you are similarly pathetic, people will not want to look at you. Respectable people like Tim Berners Lee or Steve Wozniak seldom end up on the news.

5. If you are respectable and still choose to go on reality TV, you're setting yourself up to be torn down. The justin.tv tagline is accurate: "An exercise in narcissism". Narcissism is going to prompt abuse. People think that since you've set yourself up on a pedestal, you've given them an opening to tear you down.

6. I initially had logged in watch the yCombinator dinner. That proved impractical because of the technology: the audio quality was shitty, the video would randomly drop out, and you couldn't really see anything anyway. Part of the problem for attracting a decent community is there's nothing for decent people to do. That leaves it as a festival for troublemakers.

7. Have you guys not read Shirky? Almost all the problems tonight could've been predicted from his articles. http://shirky.com/.

8. Lose the arrogance. Kyle was bragging about his 1337 MIT CS skillz in the chatroom. Emmett was talking about their being only a finite number of attack vectors, and he'd have them all patched in a week. In my experience, never underestimate the clever things people will do to break your system. People will still be finding ways to abuse it a year from now, assuming it still exists. The arrogance is just an invitation for them to try harder.

9. I won't be back, mostly because this is a complete waste of time. But I thought I'd give you the courtesy of telling you why I won't be back.

mauricecheeks• 19 years ago

I missed it when they went to start-up school. That would have been awesome! I am growing in my level of interest in justin.tv - mostly as a fascinating experiment.

Kiko guys back as reality tv stars

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