penpusher | LJ Idol Week [17] - The End of a "Social" Media Outlet

The 1995 romantic comedy “Before Sunrise” seems like a peculiar place to tell the tale of the end of a website that began more than a decade after that film. But it is, in fact, the perfect place to begin.

In that movie, American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Frenchwoman Celine (Julie Delpy) on a train and they strike up a conversation that carries through an overnight stay in Vienna. Within their conversation, they discover elements of their personalities, their hopes and aspirations, their foibles and failings, their distinct world views, all with the backdrop of the Austrian capital as their playground, and they do it for each other in front of all of us in the audience.

Early on into the discussion (courtesy of scriptwriter/director Richard Linklater and co-writer Kim Krizan) Jesse states:

Jesse: I have this idea for a show that would last 24 hours a day, for a year, straight. What you do is… you get 365 people from cities all over the world, to do these 24 hour documents of real time. Right? Capturing life as it’s lived. You know, it would start with a guy waking up in the morning, taking the long shower, eating a little breakfast, making a little coffee, reading the paper…

Celine: Wait wait. All those mundane, boring things everybody has to do every day of their fucking life?

And yet, it became real! In 2007, Justin.tv was created by a guy named Justin Kan, a man who was the life of the party, and who wanted to take the party to the world. He was one of the first “lifecasters,” people that put everything that happened to them on camera, and with a laptop and a broadband connection and a webcam attached to his ball cap, even went into the streets and showed his travels remotely, all fully live… and he did it for a year.

Eventually, others followed suit, and people became “celebrities” from it: Justine Ezarik, aka “iJustine” was an early caster on Justin.tv. Internet reporter and reality television star Sarah Austin was an early JTVer too.

Additionally, already established stars used JTV as an outlet to promote, connect with fans and have fun. Joe Rogan, then the host of NBC’s stunt game show “Fear Factor” cast regularly in the early years of the site. The Jonas Brothers and American Idol stars Kimberly Caldwell and Kimberley Locke each had their own channels on the site at one point.

But JTV was really more about the “regular” people that cast, and there was a long list of longtime casters, who would eat their meals, occasionally “put shoe on head” and yes, even sleep on cam. But, it was ultimately about connecting with people, showing viewers a little bit of your world, and maybe making friends with someone you might never actually meet face to face that was the attraction.

Personally, I have only met two JTV casters in person, with one of them, Justin Kan himself. I met him when I traveled to San Francisco in August, 2008 and dropped in on the JTV “offices.” It was a non-descript façade on a non-descript alley that even the local bus drivers knew nothing about, located just a Bengie Molina foul ball away from AT&T Park. I wandered into the front door of the structure to see staffers receiving a set of large HDTVs that they were going to place in their space.

Mr. Kan was very gregarious and peppered me with questions: how did I like the site? What elements did I think were good and not so good? He wanted to know what I thought, which really is what any owner should want to know from the people that use their product. He gave me a quick tour around and went back to work.

I was impressed at how interested he genuinely seemed to be about my opinions, and felt like he really was someone who cared about the people using the site.

But that was almost six years ago. With the explosion of video casting, including other sites like Ustream, YouTube and vaughnlive.tv (created by Mark Vaughn, a former employee of Justin.tv who left the company because of a dispute), JTV became less unique. Also, as is typical of social media sites that try to become profit making ventures, rules changed, certain people got banned for their casts. And most problematic, copyright infringement lawsuits were brought because of third party casting of films, television shows and sporting events.

What eventually happened was Twitch.tv, a sister website created specifically to show people playing video games, became a success, and it dwarfed JTV’s contributions to its parent company’s coffers.

This year, three red flags occurred. The first was that Justin.tv went from being run by Justin.tv, Inc. to Twitch Interactive, proof that the newer website had outgrown its parent.

Second, JTV stopped having “community chats,” a regular weekly cast when a couple of the JTV staffers would talk to the users to explain what was happening around the site.

But most alarming was that JTV suddenly dumped the entire archive of broadcasts for every channel, globally, just a few weeks ago. Thousands of hours of video, unceremoniously deleted, with no way to back it up for those that made it.

Finally, on the random date of Tuesday, August 5, 2014, Justin.tv slammed its doors shut, without any warning of any kind. No more logging in to your own account. No more networking with people from the site and certainly no more casting.

While I understand the concept of business, this clearly was a thoughtless and selfish move on the part of the JTV staffers. Clearly they knew that the site shutdown was imminent as they were preparing for it. Yet they didn’t even hint the end was near, not even to their long time casters or paid users, the people who helped them get to a position to have a successful venture with Twitch.

Being a “social” media site, you would think that the people running it would understand the social implications of ending it all like this. Sadly, it seems that when you turn corporate, those elements become unimportant. Apparently, such was the case here, as they effectively prevented anyone from salvaging anything of their years of casting on the site or even having one final goodbye to their viewers.

Just like Jesse and Celine’s night in Vienna, it ended all too quickly and too bitterly. But, those of us that used Justin.tv have the memories of what occurred as we have been scattered back to our own lives in our own parts of the globe. Maybe, if we’re as lucky as those two, we’ll meet again.

//

This thinkpost was created for LJ Idol, using the prompt "Scare quotes"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rafferbee.livejournal.com

It reminds me of the unceremonious end of Television Without Pity. Originally NBC was going to shut the whole thing down, but they relented and left the recaps up, but the forums are gone forever.

From:

Thinking Is Underrated

LJ Idol Week [17] - The End of a "Social" Media Outlet - Justin.tv

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