In 2007, a group of friends in San Francisco started a website called Justin TV.

The site was dedicated to what came to be known as Lifecasting. He was named after Justin Can, who streamed himself full-time, 24-7 on the site,

using a laptop he carried around in a backpack, which was hooked up to a webcam that he attached

to a baseball cap that he wore. After a few years of

just Justin, and then a few dozen other select full-timers, and in some cases nearly full-timers,

that were chosen to be broadcast on the site, they began to make some of the same tools they

were using to stream themselves,

available to anyone who wanted them. The always-on webcam thing didn't really catch on the way

that they thought it would, in part due to the limitations of technology back before the

smartphone became dominant, but the video channels, where people could talk at a camera,

that technology did catch on. If you imagine something like YouTube, but all of the videos

are just people filming themselves and what they're doing all day long, you've got a pretty

accurate mental image of Justin TV. And as the site grew, more and more people began to share

their lives with the world in this way. In 2011, four years after its founding, Justin TV split off

a category of videos that were doing particularly well on its main site and published them over on their

own separately branded page. This secondary page was called Twitch TV, and the videos that were

featured were life streams of people playing video games. Instead of just talking at the camera,

these videos featured people who would talk at the camera while playing their favorite games. Instead of just talking at the camera, these videos featured people who would talk at

the camera while playing their favorite games, allowing folks at home around the world to watch

them and hear their commentary. This subcategory of videos eventually eclipsed all of the other

video types that were being presented on Justin TV.

And the folks running the site, picking up on this and deciding to go where the audience was,

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