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With all that growth opportunity, you'd think they could invest a little more in the engineering side. I mean, I like Twitch, but their platform is still a mess

With all that growth opportunity, you'd think they could invest a little more in the engineering side. I mean, I like Twitch, but their platform is still a mess. Chat delay can be a minute or more, and the VOD situation still sucks (60 days? Seriously?). I mean, they're owned by the people who run AWS for crying out loud. They should be able to knock this out of the park. I thought YouTube Gaming was going to muscle in to this space quickly just by virtue of technical superiority. It looks like that hasn't happened yet, but Twitch can't afford to get complacent.

larrik 10y ago
At least VODs work on mobile now, that was a huge bummer. Also, Highlights last forever
concerned_user 10y ago
They've been around for almost 5 years and can't make a decent voting system it always ends up in a chat spam, why do this through chat if you can make some button for user to press, optionally with a word to type or captcha but they chose the chat spam.
15charlimit 10y ago
Youtube's interface (both broadcasting and viewing) is terrible compared to Twitch for the kind of programming people watch on it, and the "community" on Youtube is infinitely worse in every way possible to boot.
- esturk 10y ago
  That's not entirely true. On Youtube, you can instantly rewind the video like you do on a video where as on Twitch, you have to go to the videos section, wait for that section to be uploaded before rewinding. There's also 60 fps on Youtube which beats Twitch's 30 fps.
  - phit_ 10y ago
    twitch can do 60+ fps, lots of people on twitch stream 720p60fps, it's arguably the best balance between quality and bandwidth cost the only limiting factor is the bitrate limit of 3500 https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460-broadcast-requirements https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460-broa...
    - blahi 10y ago
      Yeah... try it at the LCS. Twitch's tech blows in every aspect imaginable. Shitty site, shitty flash, shitty mobile experience, shitty stream. It's a pity they have such a stronghold on streamers+viewers.
      - Eyght 10y ago
        They are currently beta testing the js player. https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e4 https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e...
  - kentor 10y ago
    Pretty sure you can stream 60fps on twitch.
sucrose 10y ago
Or at least dump all the Justin.tv usernames that aren't in use so I don't have to register a hideous username.
wesleytodd 10y ago
Fully acknowledging that some of the things they have issues with, my startup also has issues with, BUT: My startup is under 2 years old, in the same space, and with a much smaller team. We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces, and even released many other features that Twitch is only now also working on. We have regularly looked at this market and what keeps fueling twitch's success, and strictly speaking people go where the content is. It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech. If there are 500 people streaming the game you want to watch on twitch and 10 on another platform, the viewers stay on twitch. Anyway, it is an interesting problem, and one that all competitors in this space are facing. And has clearly not pushed twitch out in any way. Finally the self promotion if anyone is interested in our product: https://www.stream.me https://www.stream.me
- jedberg 10y ago
  > We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience. My point is, you haven't solved Twitch's problems at Twitch's scale.
  - wesleytodd 10y ago
    Very true, that is a continual problem that even twitch hopefully has to address often. There are no simple answers as you scale an application. I was more addressing the feature set. All a team can really do is setup an architecture that can theoretically scale, and then adjust as you reach higher and higher levels. FWIW, our site is actually a pivot after a product that reached a higher unique per day than twitch currently has (99th globally vs 63rd globally according to alexa.com). And I can say from experience that scaling a real-time experience is MUCH harder than a more traditional web app experience. But the techniques are much the same, reach the scale, see what breaks, fix.
- gedrap 10y ago
  >>> It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech. Good UX is a bonus, can be useful for growth, competing with other products once the content is on a similar level, etc. However, yes, the content is the key, yes. People come for the content, not for some extra feature (and extra features often affect only a small percentage of the users).

larrik 10y ago

At least VODs work on mobile now, that was a huge bummer. Also, Highlights last forever

concerned_user 10y ago

They've been around for almost 5 years and can't make a decent voting system it always ends up in a chat spam, why do this through chat if you can make some button for user to press, optionally with a word to type or captcha but they chose the chat spam.

15charlimit 10y ago

Youtube's interface (both broadcasting and viewing) is terrible compared to Twitch for the kind of programming people watch on it, and the "community" on Youtube is infinitely worse in every way possible to boot.

esturk 10y ago
That's not entirely true. On Youtube, you can instantly rewind the video like you do on a video where as on Twitch, you have to go to the videos section, wait for that section to be uploaded before rewinding. There's also 60 fps on Youtube which beats Twitch's 30 fps.
- phit_ 10y ago
  twitch can do 60+ fps, lots of people on twitch stream 720p60fps, it's arguably the best balance between quality and bandwidth cost the only limiting factor is the bitrate limit of 3500 https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460-broadcast-requirements https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460-broa...
  - blahi 10y ago
    Yeah... try it at the LCS. Twitch's tech blows in every aspect imaginable. Shitty site, shitty flash, shitty mobile experience, shitty stream. It's a pity they have such a stronghold on streamers+viewers.
    - Eyght 10y ago
      They are currently beta testing the js player. https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e4 https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e...
- kentor 10y ago
  Pretty sure you can stream 60fps on twitch.

sucrose 10y ago

Or at least dump all the Justin.tv usernames that aren't in use so I don't have to register a hideous username.

wesleytodd 10y ago

Fully acknowledging that some of the things they have issues with, my startup also has issues with, BUT: My startup is under 2 years old, in the same space, and with a much smaller team. We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces, and even released many other features that Twitch is only now also working on. We have regularly looked at this market and what keeps fueling twitch's success, and strictly speaking people go where the content is. It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech. If there are 500 people streaming the game you want to watch on twitch and 10 on another platform, the viewers stay on twitch. Anyway, it is an interesting problem, and one that all competitors in this space are facing. And has clearly not pushed twitch out in any way. Finally the self promotion if anyone is interested in our product: https://www.stream.me https://www.stream.me

jedberg 10y ago
> We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience. My point is, you haven't solved Twitch's problems at Twitch's scale.
- wesleytodd 10y ago
  Very true, that is a continual problem that even twitch hopefully has to address often. There are no simple answers as you scale an application. I was more addressing the feature set. All a team can really do is setup an architecture that can theoretically scale, and then adjust as you reach higher and higher levels. FWIW, our site is actually a pivot after a product that reached a higher unique per day than twitch currently has (99th globally vs 63rd globally according to alexa.com). And I can say from experience that scaling a real-time experience is MUCH harder than a more traditional web app experience. But the techniques are much the same, reach the scale, see what breaks, fix.
gedrap 10y ago
>>> It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech. Good UX is a bonus, can be useful for growth, competing with other products once the content is on a similar level, etc. However, yes, the content is the key, yes. People come for the content, not for some extra feature (and extra features often affect only a small percentage of the users).