Today, however, they are touting some numbers for their live streaming video from E3, where Microsoft announced Facebook and Twitter support on Xbox Live, a motion sensing controller called Natal, and a number of games scheduled to launch over the next year.
In all, Justin.tv’s live coverage of the event drew more than 1.6 million viewers, with a bit more than half of them watching on the Justin.tv site, and the rest watching via embeds of the stream that had been copied and pasted elsewhere. At peak, Justin.tv says they had more than 22,000 simultaneous viewers.
While the gaming news certainly deserves the spotlight, Justin.tv’s numbers speak to the rise of live video that we’re seeing in recent months. Their integration of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace (perhaps inspired by the CNN-Facebook inauguration coverage) in side-by-side chat certainly helped drive some of that traffic today, and with viewership numbers in the seven digits, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing partnerships like UStream and CBS, announced just this morning.