Justin Kan and Justin.tv: The Lifecasting Stunt That Became Twitch

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On March 19, 2007, a website called Justin.tv went live with a single product: Justin Kan. Funded by Paul Graham at Y Combinator and built with cofounders Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt, the site broadcast Kan's life around the clock from a webcam clipped to his baseball cap. Because nothing off the shelf could stream video from the street, Vogt bonded several EVDO cellular data cards through a Linux laptop that Kan carried in a hot, heavy backpack. The press compared it to The Truman Show, but the real novelty sat beside the video: a chat room Kan answered in real time.

This episode follows how that chat changed everything. Viewers quickly learned they could reach into Kan's life, sending police, firefighters, and unpaid pizzas to his door. The founders took the lesson that audiences wanted interaction, retired the backpack by the summer, and in October 2007 opened the network to anyone. What followed was a crash course in piracy, tragedy, and moderation, and then a discovery in the data that turned a chaotic experiment into a business Amazon bought for nearly a billion dollars.

• Trolls used an IP relay service built for the hearing impaired to spoof Kan's caller ID, reporting a stabbing at his apartment one day and a fire the next. It was an early, high profile case of swatting.
• The open platform detected webcams through Adobe Flash and adjusted bitrate on the fly, streaming at up to a thousand kilobits per second. By early 2008 it had 30,000 broadcasting accounts.
• Users streamed copyrighted shows and pay-per-view fights. The company adopted Vobile's fingerprint filtering in a deal with Fox, and in 2011 Zuffa, parent of the UFC, sued.
• On November 19, 2008, 19 year old Abraham K. Biggs died by suicide on a live broadcast while some viewers in the chat egged him on, forcing new flagging tools and stricter terms of service.
• Gaming streams outgrew everything else and were spun off as Twitch in June 2011. The company renamed itself Twitch Interactive in February 2014 and shut down Justin.tv that August.