Surprise, Justin.TV Builds Own CDN To Cut Costs, Improve Performance

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/16/surprise-justintv-is-actually-a-real-technology-company/#comment-1925058

by mwseibel • 19 years ago

25 16 19 years ago

plinkplonk• 19 years ago

Justin.TV seems to have a very interesting startup model. An apparently trivial "outer" application which needs a good deal of innovation "under the covers" to pull off, which is where the real competitive edge comes from. Pulls in a different direction from how most people parse "build what users want".

I wonder how they pitched it to YC (and other investors).

cstejerean• 19 years ago

they didn't pitch it to yc. IIRC their initial project was a web calendar that died when google did theirs. I think most of the current stuff they figured out when Justin did his initial stunt and it just picked up from there.

vlad• 19 years ago

>> I wonder how they pitched it to YC (and other investors).

AFAIK, Justin and a friend took part in the first YC session with a web calendar called Kiko, which they sold on eBay for 5 or 6 figures to a media company after Google came out with theirs. They started working on Justin.tv to have a product in a market which didn't exist at the time, mobile streaming video, to have a better chance of survival.

I believe Justin et al have been working on Justin.tv even before Google purchased YouTube, and are funded by investors closely linked to YCombinator who enjoyed his YCombinator calendar startup.

aston• 19 years ago

"funded by investors closely linked to YCombinator"

And maybe a little from YC partners, too...

rontr• 19 years ago

I don't think running your own software on EC2 qualifies as building a CDN.

reitzensteinm2• 19 years ago

It just uses EC2/S3 to push off excess bandwidth.

Bandwidth from a company like Alpha Red works out to about 3 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 50 megabit per second chunks, or 6 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 4tb per month chunks.

S3 is 18 cents/gigabyte.

Megabit per second is cheaper if you can keep it at 50% utilization, so baseline bandwidth is actually quite cheap. You'd be crazy to be that bandwidth intensive and pay 18 cents/gig for all your traffic. It adds up quickly.

ntoshev3• 19 years ago

Cost saving alone doesn't qualify for a CDN either. You need geographical distribution.

ntoshev3• 19 years ago

It is not at all clear what do they mean by CDN. "Taking a flash server apart and building your own" doesn't mean anything to me.

joshwa• 19 years ago

Wow, are techcrunch comments the new youtube comments?

axod• 19 years ago

My understanding of a CDN was:

You build your own geographically diverse network. Servers in each country/state/area. You put in very high speed links between each node.

When a user comes to get something from you, you redirect them to the node that is closest to them (Either geographically, or in terms of hops/ping time).

Is this not what CDN means typically?

ntoshev3• 19 years ago

Yes. But TechCrunch apparently doesn't know it.

You don't need a server in each country, just "close to your users". Like one on the east coast, one on the west coast, one in Europe, and you don't care about the rest of the world. But I am not sure Justin.tv has that.

emmett2• 19 years ago

So, technically, the software we've written is a distributed flash video distribution system, of the type one could use to run a CDN.

But "distributed flash video system" is like 20 characters longer and a lot harder to say than CDN.

It runs partly on EC2, partly on our own servers right now, and relies on the properties of neither.

It's much, much cheaper than buying software from Adobe or Wowza or paying a CDN.

iamelgringo• 19 years ago

Are you going to offer streaming services to other companies?

emmett2• 19 years ago

It's still under too much development and too unstable to offer an outside API, but it's something we're very much considering.

Surprise, Justin.TV Builds Own CDN To Cut Costs, Improve Performance

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