<i>(Not affiliated with either party, but here's my take)</i><p>Simple: clear fair use, and responsiveness to takedown requests.<p>Take NFL games as an example:<p>At any given time you can probably find a channel showing any NFL game, but you won't be able to find one that lasts the whole broadcast. That means they're pulling copyrighted content in < 3 hours, which is pretty damn good.<p>Simultaneously, you can find lots of UGC that isn't pirated on justin.tv (i.e., the site exists for more than piracy).
Justin TV's legit content consists of video game streams and young girls life casting.<p>A vast majority is pirated material. If you look at entertainment, every single one is pirated on the first page(by viewers). They are responsive to takedowns but what then happens is a new NFL stream of the game pops up or goes private. They are legal in following takedown requests but it highlights that the DMCA is not very effective on live streaming sites.<p>Viewer numbers of their 5 biggest sections front page:<p>Sports-17k pirate<p>Entertainment-10k pirate<p>Gaming-2k legal<p>Producers-3k legal(overlaps with gaming)<p>Social-1k legal(barely...)
If you hear an answer from either PG or justin.tv, I suspect it will have been reviewed by a lawyer :)<p>The owners/investors of that company aren't going to create any public text that could be used against them later in a lawsuit.
DMCA basically gives you 72 hours to take something down. Now that worked in a world where content was intended to have an unlimited lifespan ie- music, youtube videos,etc. With livestreaming video, the damage is done within a few hours or less.<p>Livestreaming sites have put content fingerprinting technology in place and often respond very fast to takedown notices. Even the fastest of responses will still cause damage. So does that mean JTV puts in a system where content owners can just start taking things down at all like ebay does with auctions? I don't know, that's scary.<p>I would never cancel cable because I can watch sports on a livestream site. The quality is usually crap with foreign commentary. Odds are the people watching that content don't have cable anyway (like myself).<p>There are two missing pieces to the content side of things when it comes to shifting people away from cable subscriptions: local news and sports. Local news could be solved in a fairly straight forward manner. Sports is up to each league,etc. If I were the NBA, NFL, MLB,etc. I would start working with livestreaming sites to do test runs of pay per view content. Once most sports games are ubiquitously available on the internet in real time and for replay Comcast should be scared. If Comcast actually had their shit together, they would have purchased JTV/Ustream/Livestream when they were cheap.<p>Right now, the real value of live video isn't from illegal sports or content, its from real time interaction. If you've ever seen a celebrity or music artist interact with their fans on a live video site, you know the platform is something special. The numbers that Jonas Brothers/Ustream/Facebook pulled in were absolutely mind blowing.
Hulu and Justin.TV makes me ask, "Who needs Cable TV & why would I ever subscribe again!" Love watching marathons of my favorite shows!<p>Thanks Justin!