54 ms·

With More Than 20M Gamers Tuning In, Twitch Raises $15M

53 points by Dobbs 14y ago

davidbrent 14y ago
Twitch is a great product and their app on android has come a long way. It is amazing that I can watch someone play my favorite game at 720p on my phone.
dageshi 14y ago
My personal opinion is that video game playthoughs are probably going to be incredibly disruptive to TV & Radio. In terms of cheap but good quality entertainment very little else can compete.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Really? Maybe for a certain niche. Watching someone else play a videogame is much more boring than just playing the game for myself. It's sometimes fun to watch "let's play" of very old games for the nostalgia, but I really don't imagine families sitting around for a screening of a GTA playthrough. EDIT: I'm aware that e-sports and "let's play" videos are popular with certain demographics. My argument is that this doesn't really constitute "disruption". Not many people are going to throw out their HBO subscription and substitute it for videos of people playing minecraft.
  - Pkeod 14y ago
    People can only spend their limited time in only so many ways. Let's Plays dominate the front page of YouTube every day, with many videos getting 1m+ views in a few days only. Many people doing it are really entertaining and funny. YOGSCAST has 2.4m subscribers. Wait until all of the kids watching LPs now grow up, have their own kids, raise them on the same stuff they enjoyed, and then sit around to watch and listen to their favorites.
  - Ronwe 14y ago
    Ofc, it is always fun to play it, but you are not watching just anyone that plays a game, but the best there are in it. It's always interesting to watch how the "pros" do it, even for a little while. It's not that different than watching sports... And not every game will be popular, just like not every sport is, but no one can't deny that a game like league of legends is not getting hugely popular, and tournament prizes are going insane. It's just that for now most people still see games as something you do "just for fun" not something you can live ofo, but that is changing as we see in this example.
  - loxs 14y ago
    Not true. Especially for games that require skill. For me it's extremely interesting to watch League of Legends pro players. They invent new strategies and create trends like popular champions to play with. I would argue that LoL is (much) more interesting to watch than Football (be it American or "real" football), Basketball X-ball, Formula 1 or you name it competitive "real" sport.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      The previous post mentioned "Playthroughs" which to me suggests single player games recorded from start to finish. I see it being unlikely that they will disrupt traditional "TV" that focuses on stuff like narrative driven dramas or documentaries. I don't see many people wanting to watch a playthrough instead of Game of Thrones or whatever. Maybe a small niche will, but not the mainstream. In terms of multiplayer game tournaments then yes, perhaps these may be successful in the way that traditional sports broadcasts are.
  - oinksoft 14y ago
    For the sake of discussion, have you watched somebody play a game that you are familiar with, at the highest level? Speed-running (trying to break unofficial records for beating a game, fulfilling certain other conditions as well usually) is quite a bit of fun to watch as an act of phsyical and mental prowess, not unlike juggling or other stunts.
    - endgame 14y ago
      Not only that, but most speedruns use trick or glitches that push the boundaries of what people think is possible in the game. Compared to an average player, a good speedrunner moves like a named character from _The Matrix_, while a regular player moves like a normal human.
  - ngokevin 14y ago
    It's a lot easier to casually open up a stream of a LP in a browser tab, than to stop what you're doing, head to the couch, and commit yourself to an hour of video games. When you're playing a game you have to focus, when watching you can just tune in whenever like when tests are running.
  - muhfuhkuh 14y ago
    On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary). This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      1 million views worldwide is pretty niche in the grand scale of things. You would need growth on a massive scale before HBO is going to consider airing them.
      - dageshi 14y ago
        How about http://www.machinima.com/ http://www.machinima.com/ 2.25 billion monthly views.
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        Those don't really look like playthrough videos , they seem to be either live action stuff themed around games or shows that use video games as a mechanism for doing CGI.
      - vm 14y ago
        Check out Machinima. They have 18 billion views in 2011-2012. That's billion with a B! Even with standard YouTube ad rates, that's a nice business. But they can bargain for higher rates because of their scale and audience demographic. Nearly all their content is UGC gaming + parodies around that. Shockingly big market (shocking to a non-gamer like me). Twitch has a big opportunity.
  - dageshi 14y ago
    You're missing the magic ingredient which is the personality of the person playing the game. Don't think of it as a "play through" only but rather playthough talk radio. http://www.youtube.com/uberhaxornova http://www.youtube.com/uberhaxornova 1.1M Subscribers, 650 million video views http://www.youtube.com/ssohpkc http://www.youtube.com/ssohpkc 660K Subscribers 380 million video views www.youtube.com/user/TheSyndicateProject 1.3M Subscribers 500M video views Which is pretty impressive bearing in mind most of those channels haven't really been around that long, 2-3 years probably. But these guys are making a lot of money through ads and they're all pretty young, oldest is probably 24-25 of the three I just linked. Which is important because I think their audience is mainly in the mid to late teens although I don't know for sure.
    - citricsquid 14y ago
      Syndicate and PewDiePie are insanely impressive, they're literally generating millions of dollars in advertising revenue. Syndicate specifically has just bought a house (at 19).
  - mej10 14y ago
    A lot of people would rather watch experts play a sport than play it themselves. I have met quite a few people that sort of gave up on being good at Starcraft 2 and instead watch the experts play it. Watching experts execute highly trained strategic and tactical skills in real time is fun for a lot of people.
  - bradleyland 14y ago
    And yet millions of people tune in to watch two groups of men kick, throw, and fumble an oblong ball back and forth down a 100 yard field every Sunday (in the US). They're not playing, so why tune in? I've not spent a lot of time with Twitch, but what I've discovered is that it's not always about the games. There are personalities developing. Certain players are more enjoyable to watch, because of the way they engage the viewer. With team-based competition games, it can be a lot of fun to listen to players try to work together, and experience the, often hilarious, mishaps that occur during a competition. In other cases, it's just fun to watch someone perform at a level that deserves appreciation. People like to watch other people. It's in our nature. Gaming has become increasingly social, so I don't find it at all surprising that gaming as a spectator sport is taking off.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Sure, but I don't know if that qualifies as disruptive. They may supplement some peoples viewing but they aren't going to be a substitute for watching a good Drama show or whatever.
  - xenophanes 14y ago
    Watching someone else play has some large advantages over playing yourself. 1) he has more skill at the game than you 2) he can put in the hours to get gear, friends to join his party, and other resources you don't have that let him do things you couldn't do 3) playing alone can be lonely. a streamer talking about the game provides some discussion about it. and streamers can be on audio chat with their friends, so you can be listening to a discussion between several people while they are playing. whereas if you play yourself maybe you don't have several friends at the same place in the game chatting with you about what you're doing 4) you can watch a stream on a computer that can't play the game 5) save money on buying the game (I often watch some gameplay footage of games i don't have to see if i'd like to play them or not) So for example I watch http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp sometimes. He is in a WoW guild that I couldn't get accepted in, doing things in WoW I couldn't do. I want to see what high end WoW is like but I don't want to spend a year to catch up. So it's great to get a taste of gameplay that has a very high barrier to entry. I also save the $15/month for a WoW sub. And for what it's worth, I bought guildwars 2 because of Kripp (for $60). It was fun to play the game while having his stream on. Why not do both in some cases!? I got tips from his stream and understood what he was doing better because I was doing similar things.
    - xenophanes 14y ago
      Kripp has 2500 viewers right now streaming google docs while he does math to optimize his hero. Another big factor for twitch viewership is that you can view it while not paying much attention and doing other stuff like reading HN. I have his stream on mute currently, and have it muted for hours sometimes. Gaming takes a lot more dedicated attention than having a stream on.
- pclark 14y ago
  e-sports are akin to fencing or sailing. they are fantastic sports if you have participated or researched them, and if you do not, they are utterly baffling -- to solve this problem you have to invest very very heavily in the user experience for the audience. having engaging commentators is only a small percentage of the problem. america's cup even has the benefit of being reasonably cool at a high level: 70ft yachts travelling at 50 knots that might flip over and kill people at any moment. fencing has, well, swords. i have never met anyone else that understands nor follows these two sports. i remain curious as to what e-sports has that make people think they would ever be mainstream.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    It's more interesting to watch pretty much any sport if you have participated in it at some point. I guess this is why soccer more popular than sailing. Most people have kicked a ball around with their friends before but wouldn't have access to a yacht. With F1 for example , plenty of people have driven a car and probably at least wanted to drive it fast, F1 is basically that desire taken to it's logical conclusion. With e-sports, the barrier to entry for picking up a games console or PC with some games on is pretty low. What will be interesting though is to see which games dominate. FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.
    - corin_ 14y ago
      > FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example. This may be true, but I'm not sure it definitely is. FPS games have been involved in some of the biggest steps esports has taken over the past decade to get to where it is (from duel games like Quake 3 to team games like Counter Strike). Right now it's true that FPS games aren't getting the same spectator numbers as some other genres, but it's also the case that FPS esports scenes aren't as big or high profile, as there aren't really any FPS games in a good enough position to compete with the likes of SC2 or League of Legends. Counter Strike 1.6 is dying and while it's newest sibling Global Offensive is picking up steam, it doesn't have the user base or the developer support (in terms of esports support) that Blizzard and Riot are showing their games. Quake Live made a decent attempt, but right now there aren't really any huge duel games. And the biggest selling FPS franchises, like Call of Duty or Battlefield, just aren't well enough suited to competitive play. Maybe the FPS era of esports is over (at the top level, that is, it's still strong lower down), or maybe it's just waiting for the right title to take it back to the top - if that happens, we'll see if the spectator problem is actually a problem. (I'm 10 days away from finishing the job I've had for five years working in and around esports, and largely due to that work, with a bit of personal preference added in too, FPS has a big place in my heart, so I certainly hope to see bigger things from it in the future. Not decided whether to stay in the industry or look elsewhere yet...)
prawks 14y ago
E-sports really are an interesting space. International tournaments with $1+ million grand prizes are nothing to shug at. Couple that with the fact that anyone can play anyone else in the world practically instantaneously and that more and more people are playing video games recreationally every day. They might not be the Premier League or the NFL, but South Korean Starcraft is certainly not far off.
- niekmaas 14y ago
  I've heard that argument about Korea ever since I started following and working in eSports (around 2004ish). Yet, I'm still waiting on that big breakthrough in the USA/Europe. I'm afraid it will still take quite some time.
  - markatto 14y ago
    League of Legends may well be that big breakthrough - major events draw more viewers than an average MLB game.
    - corin_ 14y ago
      One thing to keep in mind with comparisons like that are that it's an average game against a weekend full of above-average games. Still impressive numbers, but it's too easy to glance at them and think (and I'm not saying you were doing this) "esports getting more viewers than baseball!"
    - prawks 14y ago
      cough I think you mean DotA 2 cough ;) But in all seriousness, I think the MOBA genre may be just what it needs, whether that be LoL, DotA, HoN, or otherwise.
ilcavero 14y ago
I have been checking out twitch more and more lately (big time waster) and noticed that it's a strong magnet for creating communities around specifics streams. Not only big time e-sports are attractive, regular dudes playing some games might be the biggest attraction in the end.
- trafficlight 14y ago
  Absolutely. I follow Starcraft 2 primarily, and I make it a point to tune into Day9's show. Lately he's been averaging 6,000 simultaneous viewers for one show. That's not as impressive as the 100k views that watched the WCS European Finals this weekend, but it's lot more consistent.
aeturnum 14y ago
I've had a little professional contact with the Twitch guys, and they're all really cool (as well as having an excellent product). I think they have a lot of things about their service they could improve, but they certainly aren't sitting idly by.
jasonwilk 14y ago
Great product. Great team. The fact that these guys are not reliant on YouTube makes it that much more attractive.
Tipzntrix 14y ago
Yo e-sports aaaAAAaaa!!! - Arturo NYCFurby Sanchez, twitch caster extraordinaire
gondo 14y ago
i was just wondering if any of those "company X raised $Y" articles does actually ever mentioned how much shares were given away. was it 10%, 50%, 80% of the company?

53 points by Dobbs 14y ago

Twitch is a great product and their app on android has come a long way. It is amazing that I can watch someone play my favorite game at 720p on my phone.

dageshi 14y ago

My personal opinion is that video game playthoughs are probably going to be incredibly disruptive to TV & Radio. In terms of cheap but good quality entertainment very little else can compete.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Really? Maybe for a certain niche. Watching someone else play a videogame is much more boring than just playing the game for myself. It's sometimes fun to watch "let's play" of very old games for the nostalgia, but I really don't imagine families sitting around for a screening of a GTA playthrough. EDIT: I'm aware that e-sports and "let's play" videos are popular with certain demographics. My argument is that this doesn't really constitute "disruption". Not many people are going to throw out their HBO subscription and substitute it for videos of people playing minecraft.
- Pkeod 14y ago
  People can only spend their limited time in only so many ways. Let's Plays dominate the front page of YouTube every day, with many videos getting 1m+ views in a few days only. Many people doing it are really entertaining and funny. YOGSCAST has 2.4m subscribers. Wait until all of the kids watching LPs now grow up, have their own kids, raise them on the same stuff they enjoyed, and then sit around to watch and listen to their favorites.
- Ronwe 14y ago
  Ofc, it is always fun to play it, but you are not watching just anyone that plays a game, but the best there are in it. It's always interesting to watch how the "pros" do it, even for a little while. It's not that different than watching sports... And not every game will be popular, just like not every sport is, but no one can't deny that a game like league of legends is not getting hugely popular, and tournament prizes are going insane. It's just that for now most people still see games as something you do "just for fun" not something you can live ofo, but that is changing as we see in this example.
- loxs 14y ago
  Not true. Especially for games that require skill. For me it's extremely interesting to watch League of Legends pro players. They invent new strategies and create trends like popular champions to play with. I would argue that LoL is (much) more interesting to watch than Football (be it American or "real" football), Basketball X-ball, Formula 1 or you name it competitive "real" sport.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    The previous post mentioned "Playthroughs" which to me suggests single player games recorded from start to finish. I see it being unlikely that they will disrupt traditional "TV" that focuses on stuff like narrative driven dramas or documentaries. I don't see many people wanting to watch a playthrough instead of Game of Thrones or whatever. Maybe a small niche will, but not the mainstream. In terms of multiplayer game tournaments then yes, perhaps these may be successful in the way that traditional sports broadcasts are.
- oinksoft 14y ago
  For the sake of discussion, have you watched somebody play a game that you are familiar with, at the highest level? Speed-running (trying to break unofficial records for beating a game, fulfilling certain other conditions as well usually) is quite a bit of fun to watch as an act of phsyical and mental prowess, not unlike juggling or other stunts.
  - endgame 14y ago
    Not only that, but most speedruns use trick or glitches that push the boundaries of what people think is possible in the game. Compared to an average player, a good speedrunner moves like a named character from _The Matrix_, while a regular player moves like a normal human.
- ngokevin 14y ago
  It's a lot easier to casually open up a stream of a LP in a browser tab, than to stop what you're doing, head to the couch, and commit yourself to an hour of video games. When you're playing a game you have to focus, when watching you can just tune in whenever like when tests are running.
- muhfuhkuh 14y ago
  On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary). This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    1 million views worldwide is pretty niche in the grand scale of things. You would need growth on a massive scale before HBO is going to consider airing them.
    - dageshi 14y ago
      How about http://www.machinima.com/ http://www.machinima.com/ 2.25 billion monthly views.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Those don't really look like playthrough videos , they seem to be either live action stuff themed around games or shows that use video games as a mechanism for doing CGI.
    - vm 14y ago
      Check out Machinima. They have 18 billion views in 2011-2012. That's billion with a B! Even with standard YouTube ad rates, that's a nice business. But they can bargain for higher rates because of their scale and audience demographic. Nearly all their content is UGC gaming + parodies around that. Shockingly big market (shocking to a non-gamer like me). Twitch has a big opportunity.
- dageshi 14y ago
  You're missing the magic ingredient which is the personality of the person playing the game. Don't think of it as a "play through" only but rather playthough talk radio. http://www.youtube.com/uberhaxornova http://www.youtube.com/uberhaxornova 1.1M Subscribers, 650 million video views http://www.youtube.com/ssohpkc http://www.youtube.com/ssohpkc 660K Subscribers 380 million video views www.youtube.com/user/TheSyndicateProject 1.3M Subscribers 500M video views Which is pretty impressive bearing in mind most of those channels haven't really been around that long, 2-3 years probably. But these guys are making a lot of money through ads and they're all pretty young, oldest is probably 24-25 of the three I just linked. Which is important because I think their audience is mainly in the mid to late teens although I don't know for sure.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    Syndicate and PewDiePie are insanely impressive, they're literally generating millions of dollars in advertising revenue. Syndicate specifically has just bought a house (at 19).
- mej10 14y ago
  A lot of people would rather watch experts play a sport than play it themselves. I have met quite a few people that sort of gave up on being good at Starcraft 2 and instead watch the experts play it. Watching experts execute highly trained strategic and tactical skills in real time is fun for a lot of people.
- bradleyland 14y ago
  And yet millions of people tune in to watch two groups of men kick, throw, and fumble an oblong ball back and forth down a 100 yard field every Sunday (in the US). They're not playing, so why tune in? I've not spent a lot of time with Twitch, but what I've discovered is that it's not always about the games. There are personalities developing. Certain players are more enjoyable to watch, because of the way they engage the viewer. With team-based competition games, it can be a lot of fun to listen to players try to work together, and experience the, often hilarious, mishaps that occur during a competition. In other cases, it's just fun to watch someone perform at a level that deserves appreciation. People like to watch other people. It's in our nature. Gaming has become increasingly social, so I don't find it at all surprising that gaming as a spectator sport is taking off.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Sure, but I don't know if that qualifies as disruptive. They may supplement some peoples viewing but they aren't going to be a substitute for watching a good Drama show or whatever.
- xenophanes 14y ago
  Watching someone else play has some large advantages over playing yourself. 1) he has more skill at the game than you 2) he can put in the hours to get gear, friends to join his party, and other resources you don't have that let him do things you couldn't do 3) playing alone can be lonely. a streamer talking about the game provides some discussion about it. and streamers can be on audio chat with their friends, so you can be listening to a discussion between several people while they are playing. whereas if you play yourself maybe you don't have several friends at the same place in the game chatting with you about what you're doing 4) you can watch a stream on a computer that can't play the game 5) save money on buying the game (I often watch some gameplay footage of games i don't have to see if i'd like to play them or not) So for example I watch http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp sometimes. He is in a WoW guild that I couldn't get accepted in, doing things in WoW I couldn't do. I want to see what high end WoW is like but I don't want to spend a year to catch up. So it's great to get a taste of gameplay that has a very high barrier to entry. I also save the $15/month for a WoW sub. And for what it's worth, I bought guildwars 2 because of Kripp (for $60). It was fun to play the game while having his stream on. Why not do both in some cases!? I got tips from his stream and understood what he was doing better because I was doing similar things.
  - xenophanes 14y ago
    Kripp has 2500 viewers right now streaming google docs while he does math to optimize his hero. Another big factor for twitch viewership is that you can view it while not paying much attention and doing other stuff like reading HN. I have his stream on mute currently, and have it muted for hours sometimes. Gaming takes a lot more dedicated attention than having a stream on.
pclark 14y ago
e-sports are akin to fencing or sailing. they are fantastic sports if you have participated or researched them, and if you do not, they are utterly baffling -- to solve this problem you have to invest very very heavily in the user experience for the audience. having engaging commentators is only a small percentage of the problem. america's cup even has the benefit of being reasonably cool at a high level: 70ft yachts travelling at 50 knots that might flip over and kill people at any moment. fencing has, well, swords. i have never met anyone else that understands nor follows these two sports. i remain curious as to what e-sports has that make people think they would ever be mainstream.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  It's more interesting to watch pretty much any sport if you have participated in it at some point. I guess this is why soccer more popular than sailing. Most people have kicked a ball around with their friends before but wouldn't have access to a yacht. With F1 for example , plenty of people have driven a car and probably at least wanted to drive it fast, F1 is basically that desire taken to it's logical conclusion. With e-sports, the barrier to entry for picking up a games console or PC with some games on is pretty low. What will be interesting though is to see which games dominate. FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    > FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example. This may be true, but I'm not sure it definitely is. FPS games have been involved in some of the biggest steps esports has taken over the past decade to get to where it is (from duel games like Quake 3 to team games like Counter Strike). Right now it's true that FPS games aren't getting the same spectator numbers as some other genres, but it's also the case that FPS esports scenes aren't as big or high profile, as there aren't really any FPS games in a good enough position to compete with the likes of SC2 or League of Legends. Counter Strike 1.6 is dying and while it's newest sibling Global Offensive is picking up steam, it doesn't have the user base or the developer support (in terms of esports support) that Blizzard and Riot are showing their games. Quake Live made a decent attempt, but right now there aren't really any huge duel games. And the biggest selling FPS franchises, like Call of Duty or Battlefield, just aren't well enough suited to competitive play. Maybe the FPS era of esports is over (at the top level, that is, it's still strong lower down), or maybe it's just waiting for the right title to take it back to the top - if that happens, we'll see if the spectator problem is actually a problem. (I'm 10 days away from finishing the job I've had for five years working in and around esports, and largely due to that work, with a bit of personal preference added in too, FPS has a big place in my heart, so I certainly hope to see bigger things from it in the future. Not decided whether to stay in the industry or look elsewhere yet...)

prawks 14y ago

E-sports really are an interesting space. International tournaments with $1+ million grand prizes are nothing to shug at. Couple that with the fact that anyone can play anyone else in the world practically instantaneously and that more and more people are playing video games recreationally every day. They might not be the Premier League or the NFL, but South Korean Starcraft is certainly not far off.

niekmaas 14y ago
I've heard that argument about Korea ever since I started following and working in eSports (around 2004ish). Yet, I'm still waiting on that big breakthrough in the USA/Europe. I'm afraid it will still take quite some time.
- markatto 14y ago
  League of Legends may well be that big breakthrough - major events draw more viewers than an average MLB game.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    One thing to keep in mind with comparisons like that are that it's an average game against a weekend full of above-average games. Still impressive numbers, but it's too easy to glance at them and think (and I'm not saying you were doing this) "esports getting more viewers than baseball!"
  - prawks 14y ago
    cough I think you mean DotA 2 cough ;) But in all seriousness, I think the MOBA genre may be just what it needs, whether that be LoL, DotA, HoN, or otherwise.

ilcavero 14y ago

I have been checking out twitch more and more lately (big time waster) and noticed that it's a strong magnet for creating communities around specifics streams. Not only big time e-sports are attractive, regular dudes playing some games might be the biggest attraction in the end.

trafficlight 14y ago
Absolutely. I follow Starcraft 2 primarily, and I make it a point to tune into Day9's show. Lately he's been averaging 6,000 simultaneous viewers for one show. That's not as impressive as the 100k views that watched the WCS European Finals this weekend, but it's lot more consistent.

aeturnum 14y ago

I've had a little professional contact with the Twitch guys, and they're all really cool (as well as having an excellent product). I think they have a lot of things about their service they could improve, but they certainly aren't sitting idly by.

jasonwilk 14y ago

Great product. Great team. The fact that these guys are not reliant on YouTube makes it that much more attractive.

Tipzntrix 14y ago

Yo e-sports aaaAAAaaa!!! - Arturo NYCFurby Sanchez, twitch caster extraordinaire

gondo 14y ago

i was just wondering if any of those "company X raised $Y" articles does actually ever mentioned how much shares were given away. was it 10%, 50%, 80% of the company?