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I think it's very important for Twitch to do this, and I think they need to do it more, to be honest. Let me tell you a story. I am a big Counter-Strike: Globa

I think it's very important for Twitch to do this, and I think they need to do it more, to be honest. Let me tell you a story. I am a big Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fan. I play a bit, but I vastly prefer to watch professional play. I got into the game a year ago or so, and that seemed to be a glorious time to spectate the game. Streams were virtually exclusively on Twitch, and every weekend it felt like there was a ($100k+ prize pool) tournament, and every week there were high quality pick-up/practice games between professional players being streamed. Of course (who can blame them?), YouTube Gaming wanted a piece of this pie. They cut some exclusive deals with a couple online leagues and tournament organizer, bringing a sizable chunk of the content with them to YouTube Gaming. However, the users DID NOT follow (and UX over on YT can be almost entirely blamed), and the ensuing fracturing of the community has seen CS:GO drop from consistently top 5 in Twitch games to regularly outside the top 10. The thing is, though, the missing viewership mostly didn't migrate to YouTube, instead just deciding to not watch at all. The appeal behind Twitch and CS:GO was that there was basically non-stop _very high_ quality content being streamed, and you didn't need to put in a single ounce of effort to find it. YouTube very much does not have that same user flow down, at all. And now (even though the position isn't particularly degraded), owing to the relative difficulty of finding tournaments on YouTube OR Twitch, I find myself watching a lot less. So goes the general vibe of the community. Sure, woe is us, 2 whole sources? But consider this: YouTube's discoverability is horrible, its UI plagued with reruns emblazoned with a red "LIVE NOW" that screams for your attention at first and later leaves you unwilling to trust any visuals on the site; Twitch, on the other hand, with its inability to pause / rewind / stream a smooth 1080p60 (hell, even 720p60 stutters 10x as much as YouTube's) leaves you comparatively upset about video quality when you watch there. So I guess my point is that Twitch clearly loses in the tech department to YouTube, but its benefits (more entertaining chat, better discoverability and UI/UX) are more than enough to make you a dedicated user when exclusivity is part of that package. It'll be interesting to see which side can overcome its issues to gain the advantage. Note: edits for readability have occurred over the 5 minutes following the posting of this comment

emmett 9y ago
We care a lot about stream quality at Twitch. Can I ask where you're watching from that you get so many stutters? That's a key metric we measure ("buffer empties per hour"), so I know for a fact it's not high everywhere.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  For me, it's not stuttering but rather YouTube streams perform better given the same quality setting. For example, my connection sometimes fails to smoothly serve 1080p60 on Twitch yet handles YouTube's 1080p60 pretty well.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    I wonder if that's because YouTube uses adaptive streaming, so it may continue to show you "1080p" content, but with slightly fewer bits of data to accommodate the decline in internet speed.
    - aoeusnth1 9y ago
      How does that work? Different compression levels?
- nawgszy 9y ago
  I live in San Jose. I'll say this much: I appreciate that you tried to release 1080p60, but I am yet to see it succeed. I was watching the "Clash for Cash" between Virtus.Pro and Astralis the other day (Friday?), and it was in 1080p60 on both YT and Twitch. I eventually left your service to go to YouTube to watch there, because it was stuttering to the point of un-watchability on Twitch, and buttery smooth on YT.
  - oridecon 9y ago
    unless you're talking about mobile you can use streamlink (or livestreamer) + mpv (or vlc) and all your problems will go away you might need to tweak the config a bit I gave up using Twitch on a browser, it just sucks (and they keep adding more bloat, weird page refreshes that often load the videos twice, notifications that I have to close every single time unless I'm keeping their cookies permanently)
warent 9y ago
The last paragraph of this is the most valuable part of the TL;DR. Thank you for sharing anyway
Cyph0n 9y ago
One huge advantage YouTube has over Twitch is that it ties your existing YT channel to the streaming UI. So for instance, when a huge YT personality like pewdiepie streams, his subscribers will be notified directly and don't need to go to another website to watch and participate in the chat. Also, AFAIK, YouTube has a donation and subscriber system in place so YouTubers can earn more while they stream.
- BigJono 9y ago
  The Youtube notifications are absolutely terrible though. They stick around after the streamer is done, so every time I open YouTube I get notifications like "someone is live!" when the stream ended 8 hours ago.
  - Ferofluid 9y ago
    They stick around because by default ended streams hang around as a video and so you can watch it after the fact. Maybe they need to update the notifications so it can say "someone was live x hours ago"
    - BigJono 9y ago
      Yeah but you don't seem to get notifications for people just uploading a plain old video either (at least not by default, unless I accidentally changed something).
      - Ferofluid 9y ago
        I think there is a little bell icon next to the subscription button. If you check it videos send notification too. There is an option somewhere where you can choose which things send you notifications.
arkitaip 9y ago
Youtube's streaming is so laughable that youtubers will upload a video announcing that they are live on Twitch.
- kyrra 9y ago
  Laughable in what sense? The feeling I've gotten is from watching both is that I prefer YouTube for the actual watching (streaming just seems to work better, especially with being able to rewind live streams). But I still prefer twitch for discoverablity and just easier navigation. YouTube Gaming[0] works ok (though most people don't even know it exists), but they try to blend live and past events too much for me. [0] http://gaming.youtube.com http://gaming.youtube.com
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  The actual player on youtube streaming is wonderful. I can pause, rewind thirty seconds, watch that chunk again, then set my speed to 1.25x to catch up. You can't do that with twitch. You also can't show up 5 minutes late and watch from the start; anything between live and one-hour-delayed is a terrible experience.
  - Aissen 9y ago
    Indeed. Also, the player is everywhere. YouTube tech seems better on this side, but it's only one half of the equation.
throwaway91111 9y ago
Who watches twitch? I mean this seriously; not as a dig. Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube? I may even watch a video if i see it when browsing. But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun? How can you build a hugely expensive business off this? Is it all basically advertising for video games funded by companies?
- rfrank 9y ago
  I think it's more of an audience targeting thing, I'd guess there's not many people who are into competitive games and unaware of twitch. For me personally, I watched twitch pretty regularly when Starcraft 2 was popular, to learn tips and tricks from players better than myself. It was more akin to watching game film than entertainment content to me.
- dragonshed 9y ago
  When I was heavily into playing Hearthstone, I would regularly watch streams of players with better-than-average skill. It filled a niche for me, watching them judge circumstances and make good plays. I did the same with Overwatch, only to a much lesser extent - I personally didn't like what was available at the time.
- hellbanner 9y ago
  Yes, it's advertising. A lot of popular games on Twitch are competitive games. Many amateur players watch skillful or professional players to increase their own skills. Others watch the same way many people watch sporting teams compete. "who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun".. I suppose you haven't heard of the Superbowl, which sells ads for $5million USD https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/super-bowl-ads-waste-5-million/515682/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/super-b...
- sunsetMurk 9y ago
  Entertainment. Think sports for ~~nerds~~ gamers. Also... Some celebs* who like gaming stream as a way to connect w/ fans. * https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pros-that-stream-on-twitch-4506 https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pro...
guelo 9y ago
Google UX design in general, across all their products, is user hostile garbage. Obsessed with minimalism, taking away options and features, shoehorning everything into cross-product bland design themes, cross promoting products, preferring algorithms over humans, basically designed with Google's interests above the user's everytime.
- zanny 9y ago
  I like their current Maps app on Android a lot. Especially compared to Waze. It has a habit of popping up contextual info at the right time, and always seems to have way more data on any given location that I am 100% comfortable with, but am thankful its there anyway. Given, that is the exception. They just - for some bizarre reason - broke their own material design guidelines in the youtube app by moving the tabs bar to the bottom and coloring it white like its an iOS app. It is now a disgusting blemish on the UI, makes no sense, isn't ergonomic at all, and violated their own design rules. And they didn't even add anything with it. They just moved the bar for no good reason and infinite bad ones. The later seems to be way more the status quo than the former, sadly. The designers at Google seem to be locked into one project, and then they overengineer and reinvent the app every single year to justify their jobs, while breaking UX and alienating users. I hope I am not jinxing Google Maps here - it got overhauled like two years ago into its current state. If its "due" to be redesigned from scratch again, and they break or take away a majority of the features that make it useful now, I'm going to be sad, because there is no real competitor to the density of information Google has.
  - mbudde 9y ago
    Not that it makes the practice any better but the bottom navigation bar is in fact part of Material Design: https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation.html https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation..... It is also used in Google+ and Google Photos. The bottom-nav-vs-no-bottom-nav design trend seems to reverse frequently though. The bottom bar will probably be removed again in a year or two.
  - exogen 9y ago
    That's interesting, I wonder if Google Maps is different on iOS, where I use it – I find it utterly infuriating. Like most of us I'm plenty tech savvy and have used Google Maps since its inception. Using the latest app is the only time I ever barbarically scream at my phone. It does maddening things like make the "place info" pane (store info, hours, etc.) impossible to get back to if I do something like pan around the map a little (to see what else is near my destination) – so I have to cancel the entire search and start over just to get it back...somehow the obvious action of tapping the goddamn waypoint marker doesn't do it. There's also something that happens when navigation is active that makes the stop/X button completely disappear with no obvious way to get it back; I have to re-discover it every time after yelling at my phone for a minute to shut up/stop navigating. Just thinking about this app pisses me off. There are a dozen other little things. It's so bad.
hellbanner 9y ago
Can you explain more about this "Live Now" - is that a YT icon or an uploader icon that goes on their videos?
- nawgszy 9y ago
  It's a YT Icon that displays under live streams. The problem is, at least specifically in CS:GO, one of the companies who signed an exclusivity deal with YT loves to air reruns; this leads to YT recommending me to watch CS:GO that is LIVE NOW that is actually just a rerun being live-streamed by that company. I guess you can see how that's not entirely YT's fault, but that doesn't make the end-user experience any better.
  - 83457 9y ago
    That was the same deal on twitch though with that group.
debaserab2 9y ago
Are you sure that CS:GO isn't just a less popular game than it used to be? At least on the esports scene? Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream, I find it hard to believe that people suddenly can't find tournament streams when there's already extremely limited options to do so.
- nawgszy 9y ago
  Accepting my claim I've been watching for 1 year, when I got into it was slightly more popular than it is now, and during the middle of that time it did hit a very high peak [0]. >Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream That's the whole point: it was previously 100% effortless. If livestreams were on, they were on Twitch. You would go to twitch.tv, click the icon for CSGO which was 100% guaranteed to be on the front page, and the top streams were talented/personable professional players and/or tournaments with significant prize pools. After the deal ESL signed to start streaming CSGO on YouTube, the friction to finding a stream drastically increased (because it had previously been a URL navigation and two clicks until you were watching a stream). Then, YouTube's awful discoverability and UI/UX compounded the problem of finding streams on the new, secondary source, but that's assuming you actually knew the streams moved to YouTube and didn't just start going to Twitch and finding drastically less content, and gradually stop watching. Now, I'm not going to pretend my words are gospel or anything, but it's of serious consideration that the aforementioned peak popularity occurred in mid-January, very close to when ESL started streaming on YouTube exclusively (Feb 7 being the actual date [1]). Of course, there was a major tournament during this time as well, but this was a great tournament that you wouldn't expect to drive population numbers down so drastically as they fell off afterwards. For context: ESL is a very large player in the CS:GO scene, hosting plenty of tournaments, the most popular online league, and even Major tournaments (of which there are only a few a year with increased prize pools, the highest level of competition, additional other revenue for teams, and, less quantifiably, prestige for winning). [0]: http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y [1]: http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-league-and-youtube-partner-for-seasons-5-and-6/ http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-lea...
  - 9y ago
Ferofluid 9y ago
I've found that third party applications like Orion are far better UI wise than Twitch. The twitch web interface always felt clunky to me. I don't know how they managed to mess up the interface but Orion (a desktop app) plays the video streams far better with no weird lags or stutters. You can get the source here: https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion or just google "Orion Twitch" if you want compiled binaries. I have no affiliation with Orion, just a satisfied user.
- Ntrails 9y ago
  The only complaint I have against the twitch UI is recent, and that's the idiotic "unread message" indicator every time I log on trying to sell me prime. No. Fuck off. At this point I'm less likely to buy prime because of this. Other than that it does everything I want. Shows me all the active streams of a game I like, lets me follow people I like and get alerts when they're streaming. And the video content plays pretty well. My main remaining complaint is that they'll run adverts over active content - which is infuriating.
Shivetya 9y ago
I enjoy twitch, even support a few streamers. Note, if you have Amazon Prime and a twitch account you can support a steamer for free. Twitch did make a good move and similar to you I like watching better players at some of the games I have enjoyed. Yet for me the best feature of Twitch is to let me see some games I have yet to purchase to see if I would enjoy them.
dmartinez 9y ago
Agreed, it's interesting that competitive differentiation can succeed based on having the lowest UX friction. Google knows how to optimize performance, but design can trump performance in certain areas. Certainly, Amazon knows how to make a performant site, but it's their adherence to customer experience that gives Twitch the edge here. My money is on Twitch.
daddykotex 9y ago
> YouTube's discoverability is horrible The is pretty much my opinion as well. Fortunately I use HLTV.org to find out where the games are streamed but yeah, this is the main problem with YouTube as it is right now. It also misses the Clip feature where you can export a part of the stream as a video to share with others. The player is great though, you can fast forward, rewind 30 seconds, it performs amazing even on low performance machine/connections.

emmett 9y ago

We care a lot about stream quality at Twitch. Can I ask where you're watching from that you get so many stutters? That's a key metric we measure ("buffer empties per hour"), so I know for a fact it's not high everywhere.

Cyph0n 9y ago
For me, it's not stuttering but rather YouTube streams perform better given the same quality setting. For example, my connection sometimes fails to smoothly serve 1080p60 on Twitch yet handles YouTube's 1080p60 pretty well.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I wonder if that's because YouTube uses adaptive streaming, so it may continue to show you "1080p" content, but with slightly fewer bits of data to accommodate the decline in internet speed.
  - aoeusnth1 9y ago
    How does that work? Different compression levels?
nawgszy 9y ago
I live in San Jose. I'll say this much: I appreciate that you tried to release 1080p60, but I am yet to see it succeed. I was watching the "Clash for Cash" between Virtus.Pro and Astralis the other day (Friday?), and it was in 1080p60 on both YT and Twitch. I eventually left your service to go to YouTube to watch there, because it was stuttering to the point of un-watchability on Twitch, and buttery smooth on YT.
- oridecon 9y ago
  unless you're talking about mobile you can use streamlink (or livestreamer) + mpv (or vlc) and all your problems will go away you might need to tweak the config a bit I gave up using Twitch on a browser, it just sucks (and they keep adding more bloat, weird page refreshes that often load the videos twice, notifications that I have to close every single time unless I'm keeping their cookies permanently)

warent 9y ago

The last paragraph of this is the most valuable part of the TL;DR. Thank you for sharing anyway

Cyph0n 9y ago

One huge advantage YouTube has over Twitch is that it ties your existing YT channel to the streaming UI. So for instance, when a huge YT personality like pewdiepie streams, his subscribers will be notified directly and don't need to go to another website to watch and participate in the chat. Also, AFAIK, YouTube has a donation and subscriber system in place so YouTubers can earn more while they stream.

BigJono 9y ago
The Youtube notifications are absolutely terrible though. They stick around after the streamer is done, so every time I open YouTube I get notifications like "someone is live!" when the stream ended 8 hours ago.
- Ferofluid 9y ago
  They stick around because by default ended streams hang around as a video and so you can watch it after the fact. Maybe they need to update the notifications so it can say "someone was live x hours ago"
  - BigJono 9y ago
    Yeah but you don't seem to get notifications for people just uploading a plain old video either (at least not by default, unless I accidentally changed something).
    - Ferofluid 9y ago
      I think there is a little bell icon next to the subscription button. If you check it videos send notification too. There is an option somewhere where you can choose which things send you notifications.

arkitaip 9y ago

Youtube's streaming is so laughable that youtubers will upload a video announcing that they are live on Twitch.

kyrra 9y ago
Laughable in what sense? The feeling I've gotten is from watching both is that I prefer YouTube for the actual watching (streaming just seems to work better, especially with being able to rewind live streams). But I still prefer twitch for discoverablity and just easier navigation. YouTube Gaming[0] works ok (though most people don't even know it exists), but they try to blend live and past events too much for me. [0] http://gaming.youtube.com http://gaming.youtube.com
Dylan16807 9y ago
The actual player on youtube streaming is wonderful. I can pause, rewind thirty seconds, watch that chunk again, then set my speed to 1.25x to catch up. You can't do that with twitch. You also can't show up 5 minutes late and watch from the start; anything between live and one-hour-delayed is a terrible experience.
- Aissen 9y ago
  Indeed. Also, the player is everywhere. YouTube tech seems better on this side, but it's only one half of the equation.

throwaway91111 9y ago

Who watches twitch? I mean this seriously; not as a dig. Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube? I may even watch a video if i see it when browsing. But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun? How can you build a hugely expensive business off this? Is it all basically advertising for video games funded by companies?

rfrank 9y ago
I think it's more of an audience targeting thing, I'd guess there's not many people who are into competitive games and unaware of twitch. For me personally, I watched twitch pretty regularly when Starcraft 2 was popular, to learn tips and tricks from players better than myself. It was more akin to watching game film than entertainment content to me.
dragonshed 9y ago
When I was heavily into playing Hearthstone, I would regularly watch streams of players with better-than-average skill. It filled a niche for me, watching them judge circumstances and make good plays. I did the same with Overwatch, only to a much lesser extent - I personally didn't like what was available at the time.
hellbanner 9y ago
Yes, it's advertising. A lot of popular games on Twitch are competitive games. Many amateur players watch skillful or professional players to increase their own skills. Others watch the same way many people watch sporting teams compete. "who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun".. I suppose you haven't heard of the Superbowl, which sells ads for $5million USD https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/super-bowl-ads-waste-5-million/515682/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/super-b...
sunsetMurk 9y ago
Entertainment. Think sports for ~~nerds~~ gamers. Also... Some celebs* who like gaming stream as a way to connect w/ fans. * https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pros-that-stream-on-twitch-4506 https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pro...

guelo 9y ago

Google UX design in general, across all their products, is user hostile garbage. Obsessed with minimalism, taking away options and features, shoehorning everything into cross-product bland design themes, cross promoting products, preferring algorithms over humans, basically designed with Google's interests above the user's everytime.

zanny 9y ago
I like their current Maps app on Android a lot. Especially compared to Waze. It has a habit of popping up contextual info at the right time, and always seems to have way more data on any given location that I am 100% comfortable with, but am thankful its there anyway. Given, that is the exception. They just - for some bizarre reason - broke their own material design guidelines in the youtube app by moving the tabs bar to the bottom and coloring it white like its an iOS app. It is now a disgusting blemish on the UI, makes no sense, isn't ergonomic at all, and violated their own design rules. And they didn't even add anything with it. They just moved the bar for no good reason and infinite bad ones. The later seems to be way more the status quo than the former, sadly. The designers at Google seem to be locked into one project, and then they overengineer and reinvent the app every single year to justify their jobs, while breaking UX and alienating users. I hope I am not jinxing Google Maps here - it got overhauled like two years ago into its current state. If its "due" to be redesigned from scratch again, and they break or take away a majority of the features that make it useful now, I'm going to be sad, because there is no real competitor to the density of information Google has.
- mbudde 9y ago
  Not that it makes the practice any better but the bottom navigation bar is in fact part of Material Design: https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation.html https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation..... It is also used in Google+ and Google Photos. The bottom-nav-vs-no-bottom-nav design trend seems to reverse frequently though. The bottom bar will probably be removed again in a year or two.
- exogen 9y ago
  That's interesting, I wonder if Google Maps is different on iOS, where I use it – I find it utterly infuriating. Like most of us I'm plenty tech savvy and have used Google Maps since its inception. Using the latest app is the only time I ever barbarically scream at my phone. It does maddening things like make the "place info" pane (store info, hours, etc.) impossible to get back to if I do something like pan around the map a little (to see what else is near my destination) – so I have to cancel the entire search and start over just to get it back...somehow the obvious action of tapping the goddamn waypoint marker doesn't do it. There's also something that happens when navigation is active that makes the stop/X button completely disappear with no obvious way to get it back; I have to re-discover it every time after yelling at my phone for a minute to shut up/stop navigating. Just thinking about this app pisses me off. There are a dozen other little things. It's so bad.

hellbanner 9y ago

Can you explain more about this "Live Now" - is that a YT icon or an uploader icon that goes on their videos?

nawgszy 9y ago
It's a YT Icon that displays under live streams. The problem is, at least specifically in CS:GO, one of the companies who signed an exclusivity deal with YT loves to air reruns; this leads to YT recommending me to watch CS:GO that is LIVE NOW that is actually just a rerun being live-streamed by that company. I guess you can see how that's not entirely YT's fault, but that doesn't make the end-user experience any better.
- 83457 9y ago
  That was the same deal on twitch though with that group.

debaserab2 9y ago

Are you sure that CS:GO isn't just a less popular game than it used to be? At least on the esports scene? Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream, I find it hard to believe that people suddenly can't find tournament streams when there's already extremely limited options to do so.

nawgszy 9y ago
Accepting my claim I've been watching for 1 year, when I got into it was slightly more popular than it is now, and during the middle of that time it did hit a very high peak [0]. >Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream That's the whole point: it was previously 100% effortless. If livestreams were on, they were on Twitch. You would go to twitch.tv, click the icon for CSGO which was 100% guaranteed to be on the front page, and the top streams were talented/personable professional players and/or tournaments with significant prize pools. After the deal ESL signed to start streaming CSGO on YouTube, the friction to finding a stream drastically increased (because it had previously been a URL navigation and two clicks until you were watching a stream). Then, YouTube's awful discoverability and UI/UX compounded the problem of finding streams on the new, secondary source, but that's assuming you actually knew the streams moved to YouTube and didn't just start going to Twitch and finding drastically less content, and gradually stop watching. Now, I'm not going to pretend my words are gospel or anything, but it's of serious consideration that the aforementioned peak popularity occurred in mid-January, very close to when ESL started streaming on YouTube exclusively (Feb 7 being the actual date [1]). Of course, there was a major tournament during this time as well, but this was a great tournament that you wouldn't expect to drive population numbers down so drastically as they fell off afterwards. For context: ESL is a very large player in the CS:GO scene, hosting plenty of tournaments, the most popular online league, and even Major tournaments (of which there are only a few a year with increased prize pools, the highest level of competition, additional other revenue for teams, and, less quantifiably, prestige for winning). [0]: http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y [1]: http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-league-and-youtube-partner-for-seasons-5-and-6/ http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-lea...
- 9y ago

Ferofluid 9y ago

I've found that third party applications like Orion are far better UI wise than Twitch. The twitch web interface always felt clunky to me. I don't know how they managed to mess up the interface but Orion (a desktop app) plays the video streams far better with no weird lags or stutters. You can get the source here: https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion or just google "Orion Twitch" if you want compiled binaries. I have no affiliation with Orion, just a satisfied user.

Ntrails 9y ago
The only complaint I have against the twitch UI is recent, and that's the idiotic "unread message" indicator every time I log on trying to sell me prime. No. Fuck off. At this point I'm less likely to buy prime because of this. Other than that it does everything I want. Shows me all the active streams of a game I like, lets me follow people I like and get alerts when they're streaming. And the video content plays pretty well. My main remaining complaint is that they'll run adverts over active content - which is infuriating.

Shivetya 9y ago

I enjoy twitch, even support a few streamers. Note, if you have Amazon Prime and a twitch account you can support a steamer for free. Twitch did make a good move and similar to you I like watching better players at some of the games I have enjoyed. Yet for me the best feature of Twitch is to let me see some games I have yet to purchase to see if I would enjoy them.

dmartinez 9y ago

Agreed, it's interesting that competitive differentiation can succeed based on having the lowest UX friction. Google knows how to optimize performance, but design can trump performance in certain areas. Certainly, Amazon knows how to make a performant site, but it's their adherence to customer experience that gives Twitch the edge here. My money is on Twitch.

daddykotex 9y ago

> YouTube's discoverability is horrible The is pretty much my opinion as well. Fortunately I use HLTV.org to find out where the games are streamed but yeah, this is the main problem with YouTube as it is right now. It also misses the Clip feature where you can export a part of the stream as a video to share with others. The player is great though, you can fast forward, rewind 30 seconds, it performs amazing even on low performance machine/connections.