With the sale of Twitch Interactive to YouTube / Google having been recently reported as being virtually a done deal, it was only a matter of time before changes were made at Twitch. The first move of the company under its new ownership was to shut down the original division of Twitch Interactive. Live-streaming website Justin.tv was the first casualty of the new regime with the site closing its doors on Tuesday.

Justin.tv launched in 2007 as a “life-streaming” website that saw users live stream their lives. This quickly gave way to a more general live streaming website that saw a variety of things on the website. With that and the integration of live chat alongside the videos and social media, Justin.tv quickly grew. In 2011, the company launched the gamer-centric live streaming service Twitch. This quickly became the flagship of the company and was made the face of Justin.tv when the company was rechristened Twitch Interactive earlier this year.

In an announcement on the front page of Justin.tv on August 5th, the company announced the site’s closure due Twitch being “the focus of the company’s resources.” The company is giving users a month to transfer their accounts to Twitch before having to start anew.

Interestingly, the announcement also says that Twitch is for gaming content only. The users who don’t broadcast gaming content, and one would assume that would be most Justin.tv users since gamers would have switched to Twitch, are advised to jump ship to some of Twitch/Justin.tv’s competitors including YouTube, Ustream and Livestream.

If it wasn’t already obvious, Twitch is going all-in on gaming. While I doubt that it video game live streaming is going to lose popularity over the coming years, considering the copyright upheaval that YouTube recently went through and with YouTube taking over Twitch, there’s a risk that streamers could be looking for an alternative of their own if Twitch and YouTube botch changes under this acquisition. Granted, let’s players threatened that during the YouTube ContentID apocalypse and look at how much changed. Maybe it’s safe playing from a position of pseudo-monopoly.

Twitch Interactive also released the following video about the live streaming site’s closure.

Source: Justin.TV