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>>>I am not sure how twitch intends to benefit from this. It might staunch the bleeding. Instead of losing X streamers a month they lose .5X streamers who just

by patmcc 3y ago

>>>I am not sure how twitch intends to benefit from this. It might staunch the bleeding. Instead of losing X streamers a month they lose .5X streamers who just simulcast instead of leaving. It's an admission that they're not the big dog in streaming any more.

AraceliHarker 3y ago
The fact that Twitch has allowed simultaneous streaming on other platforms suggests that the platform is no longer able to offer famous streamers the financial incentives they are seeking.
- chongli 3y ago
  I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune. Plus those big streamers love to monetize their users through other means: Patreon, Onlyfans, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and even direct PayPal donations. They tend to try to steer their users away from large donations of Twitch subscriptions due to the large cut that goes to Twitch. All this means Twitch isn’t able to capture most of the revenue for the streaming business. I don’t know what they can do to fix it. Perhaps this new non-exclusivity deal is a way of shedding some of the deadweight. If viewers of large streams spread out to other platforms then maybe a lot of the non-revenue-producing ones will move off Twitch. Smaller streams that are more subscription-based may be less likely to do so.
  - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
    I like your theory, maybe it's a play to blunt the power / reduce costs of superstar streamers, but wouldn't larger streams / more popular streamers, be more attractive to advertisers?
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune It's the best use-case for webRTC-based delivery though. They could be saving ~90-95%[1] of their bandwidth cost on these use-cases, I find it very intriguing that they haven't adopted it after all that time. [1] actual production number when I was working on that topic.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      How does changing the protocol save 95% of the bandwidth? It's RTSP at the moment, isn't it? You can't be suggesting that the source streamer sends out millions of webRTC streams from their house, can you?
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        No but bittorrent scales as the number of user increases. P2P may be explored again.
        fidotron 3y ago
        Spitballing here . . . The unreliability of such a network for live video would make routing quite a challenge. Assuming that could be solved Twitch could offset this by reducing the number of ads shown to people acting as redistribution nodes.
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        There are a things you can try to see if this solves the problem: - don't do full P2P, keep twitch as a central server, and delegate only part of the load to P2P to those with good connection, with progressive roll in as buffering grows - get a 2 minutes padding between the live and actual video streaming, so that you have a decent buffer and margin of maneuver to switch back to twitch server - create an OBS clone that does streaming and video client with less ads as you said, but that act as an optimized node that works even when you don't what a video (the more you accumulate up time, the less you see adds, you get points, etc)
        fidotron 3y ago
        2 minutes latency is a non starter, especially for broadcasts with some level of viewer interaction.
        3y ago
  - jorams 3y ago
    > I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune. Plus those big streamers love to monetize their users through other means: Patreon, Onlyfans, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and even direct PayPal donations. They tend to try to steer their users away from large donations of Twitch subscriptions due to the large cut that goes to Twitch. I don't think they are. Given the same size total audience it's much cheaper for Twitch to distribute one stream around the world a million times than it is to distribute thousands of streams around the world a few times each. Transcoding only has to happen once, each segment only has to be distributed to each area of the world once, etc. This gets more nuanced when you include things like chat, which gets harder as you scale up, but I highly doubt that cost is significant compared to the video feed. Those large streamers may be monetizing their viewers through other means, but as long as they're not actively pulling them away from Twitch those viewers are still either watching ads or subscribing. And based on anecdotes shared by some of those big streamers Twitch ads have gotten more and more profitable.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      > I don't think they are. No, they are, according to internal leaks. Basically, after around some thousand viewers, the cost of a stream grows faster than the income it generates. Though, not sure if it's still valid after their increase of ads in the last year. > Given the same size total audience it's much cheaper for Twitch to distribute one stream around the world a million times than it is to distribute thousands of streams around the world a few times each. Same size of what? Viewers? Resolution? > Transcoding only has to happen once, each segment only has to be distributed to each area of the world once This has two flaws. Each stream is available in multiple resolutions, and the bigger a stream, the higher the chance someone will pick a different resolution than origin. Similar, most stream are kinda local, but with bigger streams, chance raises that it goes into some different corner of the world. So your argument is only valid under the assumption that the baseload of each stream would be exactly same in every detail. But you also miss the important detail, that traffic costs, and there is only so much you can do to reduce it. But somehow you think that between 1k viewers, 10k viewers and 100k viewers there is no relevant cost-difference? > And based on anecdotes shared by some of those big streamers Twitch ads have gotten more and more profitable. Yes, but that's a very recent development.
Barrin92 3y ago
>It's an admission that they're not the big dog in streaming any more. while not at their absolute peak of 2021 they certainly still are in relative terms. They've about 70-75% marketshare depending on the source (https://advanced-television.com/2023/09/04/data-twitch-losing-users/ https://advanced-television.com/2023/09/04/data-twitch-losin....) I think that's also supported by the fact that practically any other platform has to lure streamers with expensive contracts. If Twitch wasn't the go to platform any more, that wouldn't be the case.
epolanski 3y ago
OOL: then who is? Seems like twitch de facto dominates the gaming "niche".
- lovehashbrowns 3y ago
  Twitch still does but the problem with twitch has always been discoverability. Previously, if you wanted to have an audience on twitch as a new streamer, one of the things you did was have a YouTube channel and grow that then convert your audience over to your twitch stream. Lots of streamers have had audiences on YouTube first before moving over to streaming on twitch. Once TikTok really took off, you began to see twitch streamers pushing their TikTok a lot more and using that as a way to grow their community on twitch. The problem now is that both YouTube and TikTok have significant streaming platforms. That means someone with a strong YouTube presence can just skip converting users to twitch as that is already hard enough and just stay on the YouTube platform. My guess is that this is an effort to stymie that “leak” of twitch streamers that decide to stay on the platform where they’re seeing their biggest growth.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Discoverability seems far better on twitch than YouTube from the user perspective. I just think youtube has the big numbers
    - lovehashbrowns 3y ago
      Definitely 100% not true. Discoverability on twitch used to be who has the higher viewer count until they added sorting by “recommended” which is still lacking. Nowadays you still supplement your twitch growth with YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Here’s a video to back up this point: https://youtu.be/0i9gkprYekI?si=pM_u9-Lt_fBQ3glk https://youtu.be/0i9gkprYekI?si=pM_u9-Lt_fBQ3glk go to 32:00 Purely from a user perspective it’s even worse now that every stream gets an ad before you can watch any of the content. And purely from a user perspective it’s even worse because you have to go by game category then scroll through however many pages of channels there are in the category you’re interested in. They did just add stories as a feature which might help if it’s implemented correctly.
snek_case 3y ago
> It's an admission that they're not the big dog in streaming any more. Might have something to do with their quirky UI and terrible search function.

by patmcc 3y ago

AraceliHarker 3y ago

The fact that Twitch has allowed simultaneous streaming on other platforms suggests that the platform is no longer able to offer famous streamers the financial incentives they are seeking.

chongli 3y ago
I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune. Plus those big streamers love to monetize their users through other means: Patreon, Onlyfans, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and even direct PayPal donations. They tend to try to steer their users away from large donations of Twitch subscriptions due to the large cut that goes to Twitch. All this means Twitch isn’t able to capture most of the revenue for the streaming business. I don’t know what they can do to fix it. Perhaps this new non-exclusivity deal is a way of shedding some of the deadweight. If viewers of large streams spread out to other platforms then maybe a lot of the non-revenue-producing ones will move off Twitch. Smaller streams that are more subscription-based may be less likely to do so.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  I like your theory, maybe it's a play to blunt the power / reduce costs of superstar streamers, but wouldn't larger streams / more popular streamers, be more attractive to advertisers?
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune It's the best use-case for webRTC-based delivery though. They could be saving ~90-95%[1] of their bandwidth cost on these use-cases, I find it very intriguing that they haven't adopted it after all that time. [1] actual production number when I was working on that topic.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    How does changing the protocol save 95% of the bandwidth? It's RTSP at the moment, isn't it? You can't be suggesting that the source streamer sends out millions of webRTC streams from their house, can you?
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      No but bittorrent scales as the number of user increases. P2P may be explored again.
      - fidotron 3y ago
        Spitballing here . . . The unreliability of such a network for live video would make routing quite a challenge. Assuming that could be solved Twitch could offset this by reducing the number of ads shown to people acting as redistribution nodes.
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        There are a things you can try to see if this solves the problem: - don't do full P2P, keep twitch as a central server, and delegate only part of the load to P2P to those with good connection, with progressive roll in as buffering grows - get a 2 minutes padding between the live and actual video streaming, so that you have a decent buffer and margin of maneuver to switch back to twitch server - create an OBS clone that does streaming and video client with less ads as you said, but that act as an optimized node that works even when you don't what a video (the more you accumulate up time, the less you see adds, you get points, etc)
        fidotron 3y ago
        2 minutes latency is a non starter, especially for broadcasts with some level of viewer interaction.
        3y ago
- jorams 3y ago
  > I think the large streamers are a loss leader for Twitch. Delivering thousands of extremely high resolution, high frame rate, high bit rate streams costs a fortune. Plus those big streamers love to monetize their users through other means: Patreon, Onlyfans, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and even direct PayPal donations. They tend to try to steer their users away from large donations of Twitch subscriptions due to the large cut that goes to Twitch. I don't think they are. Given the same size total audience it's much cheaper for Twitch to distribute one stream around the world a million times than it is to distribute thousands of streams around the world a few times each. Transcoding only has to happen once, each segment only has to be distributed to each area of the world once, etc. This gets more nuanced when you include things like chat, which gets harder as you scale up, but I highly doubt that cost is significant compared to the video feed. Those large streamers may be monetizing their viewers through other means, but as long as they're not actively pulling them away from Twitch those viewers are still either watching ads or subscribing. And based on anecdotes shared by some of those big streamers Twitch ads have gotten more and more profitable.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    > I don't think they are. No, they are, according to internal leaks. Basically, after around some thousand viewers, the cost of a stream grows faster than the income it generates. Though, not sure if it's still valid after their increase of ads in the last year. > Given the same size total audience it's much cheaper for Twitch to distribute one stream around the world a million times than it is to distribute thousands of streams around the world a few times each. Same size of what? Viewers? Resolution? > Transcoding only has to happen once, each segment only has to be distributed to each area of the world once This has two flaws. Each stream is available in multiple resolutions, and the bigger a stream, the higher the chance someone will pick a different resolution than origin. Similar, most stream are kinda local, but with bigger streams, chance raises that it goes into some different corner of the world. So your argument is only valid under the assumption that the baseload of each stream would be exactly same in every detail. But you also miss the important detail, that traffic costs, and there is only so much you can do to reduce it. But somehow you think that between 1k viewers, 10k viewers and 100k viewers there is no relevant cost-difference? > And based on anecdotes shared by some of those big streamers Twitch ads have gotten more and more profitable. Yes, but that's a very recent development.

Barrin92 3y ago

>It's an admission that they're not the big dog in streaming any more. while not at their absolute peak of 2021 they certainly still are in relative terms. They've about 70-75% marketshare depending on the source (https://advanced-television.com/2023/09/04/data-twitch-losing-users/ https://advanced-television.com/2023/09/04/data-twitch-losin....) I think that's also supported by the fact that practically any other platform has to lure streamers with expensive contracts. If Twitch wasn't the go to platform any more, that wouldn't be the case.

epolanski 3y ago

OOL: then who is? Seems like twitch de facto dominates the gaming "niche".

lovehashbrowns 3y ago
Twitch still does but the problem with twitch has always been discoverability. Previously, if you wanted to have an audience on twitch as a new streamer, one of the things you did was have a YouTube channel and grow that then convert your audience over to your twitch stream. Lots of streamers have had audiences on YouTube first before moving over to streaming on twitch. Once TikTok really took off, you began to see twitch streamers pushing their TikTok a lot more and using that as a way to grow their community on twitch. The problem now is that both YouTube and TikTok have significant streaming platforms. That means someone with a strong YouTube presence can just skip converting users to twitch as that is already hard enough and just stay on the YouTube platform. My guess is that this is an effort to stymie that “leak” of twitch streamers that decide to stay on the platform where they’re seeing their biggest growth.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Discoverability seems far better on twitch than YouTube from the user perspective. I just think youtube has the big numbers
  - lovehashbrowns 3y ago
    Definitely 100% not true. Discoverability on twitch used to be who has the higher viewer count until they added sorting by “recommended” which is still lacking. Nowadays you still supplement your twitch growth with YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Here’s a video to back up this point: https://youtu.be/0i9gkprYekI?si=pM_u9-Lt_fBQ3glk https://youtu.be/0i9gkprYekI?si=pM_u9-Lt_fBQ3glk go to 32:00 Purely from a user perspective it’s even worse now that every stream gets an ad before you can watch any of the content. And purely from a user perspective it’s even worse because you have to go by game category then scroll through however many pages of channels there are in the category you’re interested in. They did just add stories as a feature which might help if it’s implemented correctly.

snek_case 3y ago

> It's an admission that they're not the big dog in streaming any more. Might have something to do with their quirky UI and terrible search function.