As someone who funded them, I disagree with you. What investors are looking for is scale combined with profitability. Often the best way to achieve that is to optimize for scale first, as Google did.

It's easy to "build a profitable company." Just start an unambitious service business with low costs. But it is much harder to start from that and add scale than to start from scale and add profitability.

It's also pretty easy to create a large scale business by taking shortcuts like streaming copyrighted content. Look at Grooveshark, Stage6, or any of the hundreds of popular torrent sites.

For someone who's used to creating normal web products it's shocking to see how fast a site can grow with copyrighted content.

It's not "make something people want" it's "give people what you already know they want but can't get for free".

Welcome to the current world of web 2.0. Justin.tv will either figure out how to become profitable or will be bought out by an already profitable company. Probably the latter, but time will tell. Either way their technology is worth millions and that would be a hot sell.

I have a lot of respect for Justin.tv's founders/team. If you're going to be pessimistic, please be pessimistic because of a valid point. HN is a great community and I really enjoy the people who post on here...I want it to stay that way!

I said nothing about the founding team, and I hope their next project will work out great, but video streaming bandwagon (which started with justin.tv) is defacto overhyped and underperforming industry. anyways, goodluck.

in terms of revenue underperforming, of course it grows like crazy because everybody uses it to stream paid tv channels. go on google and search for soccer games that are not broadcasted on free channels and you will see the growth. anyways, i dont see a point in this discussion anymore.

i am out. (btw, keep downvoting :) )

come on, we all know that at the end of the day you have to make money.