Thursday, January 15, 2009

Free cable?

While mindlessly surfing the net, I happened to stumble upon this site called justin.tv. Of course I had heard that 19 year old Abraham K. Briggs committed suicide on this site but I never really bothered to know what justin.tv was all about. So one day I decided to find out why Mr. Briggs ended his life prematurely and was shocked to find... FREE CABLE! It turns out that on this site, you can find a lot of channels which videostream content based on the preference of the channel owner. I found myself watching 24 hours of dragonball Z and on one channel I was able to watch that new flick by Bradd Pitt called "The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons" and it wasn't even showing in theaters yet. So I thought to myself is this sh*t legal? Well I did a little research and found that justin.tv originally started off as a lifecasting project which means that the channels on this site videostreamed the life of whomever owned the channel ala Jim Carrie's Truman Show. At the onset, Justin Kan, one of the founders of the site, attached a webcam to his head and streamed the contents of his everday life for all to see via his site. Eventually the technology was made open to applicants and people could just create their own channels with customizable content. There are thousands of channels on Justin.tv and not all of them show lifestreams... you can even find channels devoted to anime only... If you know where to look :) So is this the future of television? Well all I can say for now is KAMEHAMEHA!

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