Live Broadcasting Service, Justin.tv, Launches "DVR" Feature

In a posting on its corporate blog Thursday, Justin.tv, a San Francisco-based company that bills itself as "the largest online community for people to broadcast, watch and interact around live video" (it claims to have around 428,000 live video channels, to which 20 hours of video are uploaded each minute, and says its Web site receives over 41 million unique visitors per month), announced the launch of what it calls "DVR" functionality for its live-streaming video service.

The new feature is implemented via a bar that appears under a live broadcast's video window and that invites the user to "Continue watching this later..." When the user clicks on the bar, s/he is presented with a URL (for example, http://justin.tv/officecam#from-15:09.june-12-2009) which s/he can then use for up to seven days in order to resume watching the video s/he was watching at the point where s/he left off. "We've offered archived video for a long time, but due to the nature of live content there often ends up being tons of material there that is tough to navigate when you know exactly what you're looking for," Justin.tv's blog posting on the new DVR functionality states. "We think this makes it a lot easier for to find what you're looking for and also much easier to share that with others."