I wish I could post the graph of unique visitors that the founders of Justin.TV sent me. But while their actual numbers are presumably secret, I will say that I have never seen a steeper graph of a one-year period from any YC-funded startup. And I have seen some steep graphs now.
I don't think this is something justin.tv is happy about because it kind of transforms "broadcast yourself" into "share your cable subscription with strangers" and inevitably leads to a conflict with Fox+ESPN+friends [and possibly with cable/sat. providers too]
It all comes down to bandwidth. It doesn't exist and the situation is not improving, I'm 100% with Matt here. Even ESPN's premiere 360 offering pretty much sucks, let alone Justin's streams: they're basically backups for people who don't have TV access (on the road, in another country, etc).
Security-minded, TCP-dominant, firewalled to death "Big Internet" is simply the wrong platform to stream live HD video. Having worked at an IP-based HD video surveillance startup I was amazed at how hard it was to reliably push high-def streams over TCP/IP even within a large local enterprise network. Most of our IP was all about bandwidth management. I honestly can't even imagine what would it take to stream even CNN to all their viewers, let alone superbowl.
Easy place to start - start hiring a small TV station for an hour in the morning, somewhere in amongst the informercials, and broadcast a signal that people with TV Tuners can decode. Using some variation of colour 3D barcodes, say. Have the TV Tuner decode software use this hour to pump content into squid or some other form of web cache.
Monetisation strategy: give people the ability to vote on what gets broadcast based on their cache logs.
Perhaps a frame based variation on the bittorrent protocol is the way to go, where you're constantly torrenting sequential blocks of content and viewing with a slight delay. I think people would find that acceptable for live events that aren't popular in their current location, but broadcast is still superior for mass appeal content.
including embedded players: http://www.quantcast.com/p-16uNVwiyGoWyg
Also, some real-time data: http://live.justin.tv/
However, "bandwidth" isn't really what matters. It's the last mile connection to end users. Big CDN's like Akamai have this figured out and can pump millions of simultaneous live streams directly into end user networks without congesting any internet backbones.
It turns out that the main reasons we aren't all watching TV online right now is that big TV networks 1) are afraid of cannibalizing their existing revenue streams, and 2) think it costs a lot money. Neither of these are strictly misconceptions, but they aren't nearly as true as they were even a year ago.
Justin.tv has developed technology and infrastructure that brings the cost of distributing live video below the cost of serving static video, so I guess that makes it all about the revenue streams. It should be interesting to see what happens to this space in the next couple of years.
I guess the majority of people still find it tough to hook their computer up to their TV screen. I can't see what the problem is myself. Surely soon most people will be able to do this soon.
Are you sure about some of the claims you're making?
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2007...
^^^ This article seems to think viewership is down and I've heard that repeatedly over the last few years.
Hopefully IPv6 and global multicast should solve this once we finally rid ourself of this ancient thing called IPv4.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
I see people are saying that the hierarchical address-assignment is to some extent going out the window, but apart from that, how is IPv6 routing going to be a bigger mess than the current IPv4 routing?
1) TV screens are much bigger and cheaper. They don't need the resolution a monitor does. Watching on a small screen is something you're happy to be able to do on a plane, but would never want to do on a day to day basis.
2) Bandwidth is still not there, especially for HDTV, and progress seems to be stalled. I still have pretty much the same connection for the same price that I did 5 years ago, and I'll likely still have it in 5 years from now. Mark Cuban talks about this a lot. Fiber to the premises may solve this one soon for some subset of the country, but by no means everyone.
3) Live television is nearly non-existent online. It can't handle it. The bandwidth to stream the Superbowl to everyone who wants it doesn't exist. Sports are a huge part of the TV viewing audience.
4) Many people like to watch shows as soon as they're released. The internet is terrible for this. I personally download mine, but I do so knowing that I'm always going to be watching the Daily Show from 2 days ago. If I were a TV addict (i.e. normal American) that would be unacceptable.
5) Content quality is better than ever. Single camera sitcoms, pay channel dramas, reality tv (if you're into that). Almost everyone agrees this is a golden era of television.
If you really think that more people are watching TV on a computer than on a good old-fashioned TV, you need to come down from your Silicon Valley mountain for a while.