13 ms·

Twitch rides video game streaming wave to global success

58 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

percentcer 13y ago
Planet Money just did a special on cable channel bundling, focusing on ESPN's early days and rise to prominence, and it really made me think we're about to witness that same path with twitch. It's perfectly positioned to be the ESPN for the internet generation.
- TillE 13y ago
  The audience and money involved with e-sports is a microscopic fraction of any major professional sport. This is an interesting nerd culture thing, but if you want a serious example of sports adapting to the internet generation, look at what NBC is doing with the English Premier League. I don't have the numbers, but I'd bet that the audience for football (soccer) is growing faster in America over the past few years than the whole of e-sports.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    it's still unclear where the audience will capp off as far as esports goes. soccer has been around for most living people's entire lives, whereas esports only spans 1-2 generations at most. The growth in soccer audience could be largely attributed to tech making it more accessible, whereas with esports people are completely new to the notion of competitive video games.
  - cdash 13y ago
    Are you using a percentage growth as your measurement or an absolute value because I can guarantee you that if you are using a percentage value this is not true.
  - baldfat 13y ago
    Yeah a HUGE world wide sport that has been around for decades and has one of the largest sporting events in the world has more viewers then my nerd watch habit??? GO figure???? Millions upon millions of dollars are being made so sure eSports is a big deal.
Shivetya 13y ago
I find Twitch useful for saving money, so many games out there and watching how they actually play lets me put my money to games that actually fit my play style. There are some interesting personalities on Twitch, some of the money a few claim to pull in is impressive. Fortunately personality and ability drive followings, having cleavage and a cute face will only get you so far.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Gotta love the sexist-comment-apropos-of-nothing you managed to throw in at the end there.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Yes, claiming that personality and ability is more important than cleavage and a cute face is definitely sexist.
    - cantankerous 13y ago
      If it's not sexist, it sure is still apropos of nothing given the context. Whenever I watch Twitch, I'm rarely looking at somebody's face on the stream (because there isn't one). If there is, it's surely not a face made to "look cute". It's usually a guy with his mouth hanging open because he's concentrating on a game. Using "cleavage" intimates that it's only women (or typifies women as some "other") that try to use their looks on Twitch to get far because they don't have any personality or ability. OP could have just said "good looks" to get the point across.
      - macNchz 13y ago
        I went on Twitch for the first time ever tonight as I was reading the linked article, clicked on World of Warcraft at random, and 6 of the 11 featured streams visible above the fold included a picture-in-picture of a cute girl with lots of cleavage. I clicked one out of interest and she wasn't even playing a game...she had the twitch chat up on her screen and was soliciting donations while people spammed the chat with "I wanna cum on your tits" like I was on some awful video game camgirl site. Anyway, clearly you're not watching WoW videos, but statement above was not 'apropos of nothing'.
KVFinn 13y ago
>"The eSports audience is a particularly valuable one for brand advertisers because they are hard to reach via traditional media channels," said DiPietro. "They tend to be extremely tech savvy, they are often cord-cutters, and they are hyper-engaged in the online video and chat experience -- all of which makes them very valuable for advertisers." And very likely to use ad-block. I wonder when Twitch finally starts baking ads into the actual of the stream.
- ubercore 13y ago
  There would be a lot of benefit to doing this, since one of the major complaints about Twitch service is ads that don't follow the rules and ignore volume controls. I don't believe they've solved this problem yet. What would be really impressive is getting the same level of targeting they can currently offer with flash-based ads by encoding the ad into the stream as part of their CDN... Sounds like a fun problem!
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  Which makes the subset that does not use adblock even more valuable. They fit the same demographic but are actually open to seeing your advertising. (I'm stopping here, but I could go on a whole rant about the anti adblock nonsense)
- dyselon 13y ago
  Man, I'm ready. I'm pretty tired of ads that randomly ignore mute, have "skip" buttons that don't work, or otherwise just don't function correctly. Also, I always feel like I'm cheating when I watch from my tablet or 360, which don't get ads.
changdizzle 13y ago
congrats kevin, emmett and team! what's awesome about this is that not only is twitch revolutionizing how people consume video games, the people that make up twitch are also so passionate about what they do. it'll be really interesting to see how they ramp up monetization efforts as they've tried a variety of things (ads instream, sponsored links on the sidebar by kabam, subscription models for streams), but i'm confident they'll get it right.
kanamekun 13y ago
Congrats Emmett! Was really inspired to read about how you guys built up Twitch: http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-interview/ http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-interview/ Totally agree with others that you're building up the next ESPN.
- weixiyen 13y ago
  Why is ESPN showing Nascar instead of starting up a gaming channel?
  - spoiledtechie 13y ago
    Wow. Awesome thought...
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    The better question might be to ask when ESPN will buy up Twitch.
  - nols 13y ago
    Money, Nascar's TV contracts over the next decade are worth nearly $5 billion.
colmvp 13y ago
I like Twitch, but it's interesting to see comments from Redditors and especially European users who have huge frustrations over the quality of streams, bugginess, and chat which never seems to work right. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_feel_bad_for_streamers/ http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_fe... http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_... http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/ http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_rai...
- baddox 13y ago
  They definitely have major issues due to the sheer amount of bandwidth they need to utilize. I find their popular stream (or perhaps it's all streams during popular events) watchable (at any resolution, and it's definitely not my Internet connection) around half of the time. I have seen Twitch representatives essentially blame this on the ISPs/backbones. They say they try to make deals to secure bandwidth across backbones, but they're often just at the mercy of the big guys. The most well-known issue was with Time Warner, which was apparently solved later according to a Twitch blog post. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_shear_founder_and_ceo_of_twitch_the/ca4o3y7 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_sh... http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-twitch-to-improve-service/ http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-t...
- LispShmisp 13y ago
  Indeed there are some serious issues with Twitch in Europe. For about a year streams were crystal clear with no issues. Then they started to mess with stream qualities, I guess they had to do some interesting optimizations in order to deal with increasing userbase. So since this summer I've only been able to watch streams on highest quality a couple of times. Problem with second highest quality is that whenever there's movement in-game, stream looks pixelated, some games look especially bad: [ARMA: DayZ on Twitch High quality] http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr Another interesting thing is that even if stream lags on highest quality, I'm still able launch multiple concurrent streams of second highest quality and none of them lag (I launched 5 streams, after which CPU usage maxes out, so I didn't try more). But watching a SINGLE stream on highest quality? Nop, not going to happen, while audio is fine, video stutters every 5-10sec, freezes for 2sec, rinse&repeat.
bprater 13y ago
The 'superbowl' of the game mentioned in the article -- League of Legends is happening tonight at 8pm PST. Watch the event here: http://na.lolesports.com/ http://na.lolesports.com/ I've been a gamer all my life and this game keeps hooking me -- I've been playing consistently for 3 years now.
- weixiyen 13y ago
  I'd like to think of it as the final game in the World Cup, since it's a Korean team vs a Chinese team.
- spoiledtechie 13y ago
  How to watch? Can't find the link on the site? Does it open up minutes before the match?
  - sniW 13y ago
    I believe they'll be streaming it from here: http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames Starts at 8pm PDT.
brymaster 13y ago
Twitch desperately needs a competitor as they're running in a space virtually unchecked. Youtube doesn't count because they're not putting their full weight against video game live streaming and the article was simply throwing Azubu a bone by mentioning them. Apparently their last real competitor, Own3D.tv, couldn't make good on payments owed to streamers and closed up shop. That should be a pretty good indicator about the profitability of this business model. Twitch has some interesting exclusivity deals with Xbox, PS4 and Mojang but forced ads for a Honda Civic I don't care about on the video preroll can't be paying their bills. Twitch is still powered by venture capital, with their latest $20 million Series C round a few days ago. No doubt the exit strategy is to reach critical mass and then unload the business onto a company that can handle the bandwidth bills + stream partner payouts.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - baldfat 13y ago
    And what streamer is going to trust them? I think there are MANY top streamers that were owed thousands of dollars. Twitch.tv was a DISTANT 2nd place to Own3D but then streamers were paid to move to Twitch (Dignatas LOL) and than once the checks strarted not coming it was a fast transition to twitch. Also Azubu has streaming in Korea http://www.azubu.tv/index.do http://www.azubu.tv/index.do. Europe is the place for someone to come in and fix their latency problems that Twitch causes.
    - brymaster 13y ago
      Parent comment said that Own3D.tv guys have started up again as http://hitbox.tv/ http://hitbox.tv/ Reposting here because parent deleted his comment.
- echohack 13y ago
  Experienced Twitch streamer here. I've been streaming for almost 2 years now to Twitch. On Profitability: In the gaming space, it's all about the sponsorships. Yes, Twitch ads are going to be nice cash for them, but I would ultimately expect their business to ride on helping promote company's gaming events. Stream partner payouts are trash, pure and simple. Pull in 100,000 uniques over a month? You're not even eligible for partner status. On YouTube, you can get ~$300.00 for the same viewership. Somehow I don't think that partnerships are costing them much money at all. Own3D.tv was only a "competitor" in the sense that they promised to pay out more to stream partners. They were full of lies. Several times Own3D.tv had big pushes to gobble up popular streamers from Twitch. I was contacted several times. Overall the Own3D.tv site was trash compared to Twitch's features, and the second you ask them the hard questions, "How often do you pay / When do I see my first paycheck", they couldn't answer you. TLDR; Twitch will be profitable by keeping their costs down, building partnerships, and building brand recognition. Advertising isn't the end game for Twitch.
kleiba 13y ago
I really like twitch.tv and have spent hours watching it. But for reasons I don't want to go into, I'm forced to use a very outdated browser. And yet they managed to give me a really good UX over at twitch.tv. Until recently, that is. Unfortunately, they changed their interface recently and as an effect my obsolete browser can't render some of their content anymore. It's especially sad for me, not only because I'd still really like to be able to watch twitch.tv, but also because it all used to work fine until recently AND the sites in question do not contain anything magically: it's simply that people's profile sites don't work anymore. But these pages contain the lists of videos people uploaded and without these lists, there's nothing to watch :-( Oh, well. Of course the solution is simple: upgrade. But as I said above, it's currently not an option for me. So all that's left for me to do is cry. And write overly dramatic posts to HN, of course.
- Miyamoto 13y ago
  What is your very old browser? That bit of information might, you know, help Twitch web developers reading this.
  - kleiba 13y ago
    Well, yeah, I already contacted them directly when my browser stopped working with the site and they pretty much said they can't support stone-old browsers. Can't blame them.
erickhill 13y ago
Strikes me that this could be an interesting acquisition target for Yahoo. They have the infrastructure and cash to support its growth. Twitch also has the added bonus of already being purple, too.

58 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

Planet Money just did a special on cable channel bundling, focusing on ESPN's early days and rise to prominence, and it really made me think we're about to witness that same path with twitch. It's perfectly positioned to be the ESPN for the internet generation.

TillE 13y ago
The audience and money involved with e-sports is a microscopic fraction of any major professional sport. This is an interesting nerd culture thing, but if you want a serious example of sports adapting to the internet generation, look at what NBC is doing with the English Premier League. I don't have the numbers, but I'd bet that the audience for football (soccer) is growing faster in America over the past few years than the whole of e-sports.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  it's still unclear where the audience will capp off as far as esports goes. soccer has been around for most living people's entire lives, whereas esports only spans 1-2 generations at most. The growth in soccer audience could be largely attributed to tech making it more accessible, whereas with esports people are completely new to the notion of competitive video games.
- cdash 13y ago
  Are you using a percentage growth as your measurement or an absolute value because I can guarantee you that if you are using a percentage value this is not true.
- baldfat 13y ago
  Yeah a HUGE world wide sport that has been around for decades and has one of the largest sporting events in the world has more viewers then my nerd watch habit??? GO figure???? Millions upon millions of dollars are being made so sure eSports is a big deal.

Shivetya 13y ago

I find Twitch useful for saving money, so many games out there and watching how they actually play lets me put my money to games that actually fit my play style. There are some interesting personalities on Twitch, some of the money a few claim to pull in is impressive. Fortunately personality and ability drive followings, having cleavage and a cute face will only get you so far.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
Gotta love the sexist-comment-apropos-of-nothing you managed to throw in at the end there.
- baddox 13y ago
  Yes, claiming that personality and ability is more important than cleavage and a cute face is definitely sexist.
  - cantankerous 13y ago
    If it's not sexist, it sure is still apropos of nothing given the context. Whenever I watch Twitch, I'm rarely looking at somebody's face on the stream (because there isn't one). If there is, it's surely not a face made to "look cute". It's usually a guy with his mouth hanging open because he's concentrating on a game. Using "cleavage" intimates that it's only women (or typifies women as some "other") that try to use their looks on Twitch to get far because they don't have any personality or ability. OP could have just said "good looks" to get the point across.
    - macNchz 13y ago
      I went on Twitch for the first time ever tonight as I was reading the linked article, clicked on World of Warcraft at random, and 6 of the 11 featured streams visible above the fold included a picture-in-picture of a cute girl with lots of cleavage. I clicked one out of interest and she wasn't even playing a game...she had the twitch chat up on her screen and was soliciting donations while people spammed the chat with "I wanna cum on your tits" like I was on some awful video game camgirl site. Anyway, clearly you're not watching WoW videos, but statement above was not 'apropos of nothing'.

KVFinn 13y ago

>"The eSports audience is a particularly valuable one for brand advertisers because they are hard to reach via traditional media channels," said DiPietro. "They tend to be extremely tech savvy, they are often cord-cutters, and they are hyper-engaged in the online video and chat experience -- all of which makes them very valuable for advertisers." And very likely to use ad-block. I wonder when Twitch finally starts baking ads into the actual of the stream.

ubercore 13y ago
There would be a lot of benefit to doing this, since one of the major complaints about Twitch service is ads that don't follow the rules and ignore volume controls. I don't believe they've solved this problem yet. What would be really impressive is getting the same level of targeting they can currently offer with flash-based ads by encoding the ad into the stream as part of their CDN... Sounds like a fun problem!
hayksaakian 13y ago
Which makes the subset that does not use adblock even more valuable. They fit the same demographic but are actually open to seeing your advertising. (I'm stopping here, but I could go on a whole rant about the anti adblock nonsense)
dyselon 13y ago
Man, I'm ready. I'm pretty tired of ads that randomly ignore mute, have "skip" buttons that don't work, or otherwise just don't function correctly. Also, I always feel like I'm cheating when I watch from my tablet or 360, which don't get ads.

changdizzle 13y ago

congrats kevin, emmett and team! what's awesome about this is that not only is twitch revolutionizing how people consume video games, the people that make up twitch are also so passionate about what they do. it'll be really interesting to see how they ramp up monetization efforts as they've tried a variety of things (ads instream, sponsored links on the sidebar by kabam, subscription models for streams), but i'm confident they'll get it right.

kanamekun 13y ago

Congrats Emmett! Was really inspired to read about how you guys built up Twitch: http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-interview/ http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-interview/ Totally agree with others that you're building up the next ESPN.

weixiyen 13y ago
Why is ESPN showing Nascar instead of starting up a gaming channel?
- spoiledtechie 13y ago
  Wow. Awesome thought...
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  The better question might be to ask when ESPN will buy up Twitch.
- nols 13y ago
  Money, Nascar's TV contracts over the next decade are worth nearly $5 billion.

colmvp 13y ago

I like Twitch, but it's interesting to see comments from Redditors and especially European users who have huge frustrations over the quality of streams, bugginess, and chat which never seems to work right. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_feel_bad_for_streamers/ http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_fe... http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_... http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/ http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_rai...

baddox 13y ago
They definitely have major issues due to the sheer amount of bandwidth they need to utilize. I find their popular stream (or perhaps it's all streams during popular events) watchable (at any resolution, and it's definitely not my Internet connection) around half of the time. I have seen Twitch representatives essentially blame this on the ISPs/backbones. They say they try to make deals to secure bandwidth across backbones, but they're often just at the mercy of the big guys. The most well-known issue was with Time Warner, which was apparently solved later according to a Twitch blog post. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_shear_founder_and_ceo_of_twitch_the/ca4o3y7 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_sh... http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-twitch-to-improve-service/ http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-t...
LispShmisp 13y ago
Indeed there are some serious issues with Twitch in Europe. For about a year streams were crystal clear with no issues. Then they started to mess with stream qualities, I guess they had to do some interesting optimizations in order to deal with increasing userbase. So since this summer I've only been able to watch streams on highest quality a couple of times. Problem with second highest quality is that whenever there's movement in-game, stream looks pixelated, some games look especially bad: [ARMA: DayZ on Twitch High quality] http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr Another interesting thing is that even if stream lags on highest quality, I'm still able launch multiple concurrent streams of second highest quality and none of them lag (I launched 5 streams, after which CPU usage maxes out, so I didn't try more). But watching a SINGLE stream on highest quality? Nop, not going to happen, while audio is fine, video stutters every 5-10sec, freezes for 2sec, rinse&repeat.

bprater 13y ago

The 'superbowl' of the game mentioned in the article -- League of Legends is happening tonight at 8pm PST. Watch the event here: http://na.lolesports.com/ http://na.lolesports.com/ I've been a gamer all my life and this game keeps hooking me -- I've been playing consistently for 3 years now.

weixiyen 13y ago
I'd like to think of it as the final game in the World Cup, since it's a Korean team vs a Chinese team.
spoiledtechie 13y ago
How to watch? Can't find the link on the site? Does it open up minutes before the match?
- sniW 13y ago
  I believe they'll be streaming it from here: http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames Starts at 8pm PDT.

brymaster 13y ago

Twitch desperately needs a competitor as they're running in a space virtually unchecked. Youtube doesn't count because they're not putting their full weight against video game live streaming and the article was simply throwing Azubu a bone by mentioning them. Apparently their last real competitor, Own3D.tv, couldn't make good on payments owed to streamers and closed up shop. That should be a pretty good indicator about the profitability of this business model. Twitch has some interesting exclusivity deals with Xbox, PS4 and Mojang but forced ads for a Honda Civic I don't care about on the video preroll can't be paying their bills. Twitch is still powered by venture capital, with their latest $20 million Series C round a few days ago. No doubt the exit strategy is to reach critical mass and then unload the business onto a company that can handle the bandwidth bills + stream partner payouts.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- baldfat 13y ago
  And what streamer is going to trust them? I think there are MANY top streamers that were owed thousands of dollars. Twitch.tv was a DISTANT 2nd place to Own3D but then streamers were paid to move to Twitch (Dignatas LOL) and than once the checks strarted not coming it was a fast transition to twitch. Also Azubu has streaming in Korea http://www.azubu.tv/index.do http://www.azubu.tv/index.do. Europe is the place for someone to come in and fix their latency problems that Twitch causes.
  - brymaster 13y ago
    Parent comment said that Own3D.tv guys have started up again as http://hitbox.tv/ http://hitbox.tv/ Reposting here because parent deleted his comment.
echohack 13y ago
Experienced Twitch streamer here. I've been streaming for almost 2 years now to Twitch. On Profitability: In the gaming space, it's all about the sponsorships. Yes, Twitch ads are going to be nice cash for them, but I would ultimately expect their business to ride on helping promote company's gaming events. Stream partner payouts are trash, pure and simple. Pull in 100,000 uniques over a month? You're not even eligible for partner status. On YouTube, you can get ~$300.00 for the same viewership. Somehow I don't think that partnerships are costing them much money at all. Own3D.tv was only a "competitor" in the sense that they promised to pay out more to stream partners. They were full of lies. Several times Own3D.tv had big pushes to gobble up popular streamers from Twitch. I was contacted several times. Overall the Own3D.tv site was trash compared to Twitch's features, and the second you ask them the hard questions, "How often do you pay / When do I see my first paycheck", they couldn't answer you. TLDR; Twitch will be profitable by keeping their costs down, building partnerships, and building brand recognition. Advertising isn't the end game for Twitch.

kleiba 13y ago

I really like twitch.tv and have spent hours watching it. But for reasons I don't want to go into, I'm forced to use a very outdated browser. And yet they managed to give me a really good UX over at twitch.tv. Until recently, that is. Unfortunately, they changed their interface recently and as an effect my obsolete browser can't render some of their content anymore. It's especially sad for me, not only because I'd still really like to be able to watch twitch.tv, but also because it all used to work fine until recently AND the sites in question do not contain anything magically: it's simply that people's profile sites don't work anymore. But these pages contain the lists of videos people uploaded and without these lists, there's nothing to watch :-( Oh, well. Of course the solution is simple: upgrade. But as I said above, it's currently not an option for me. So all that's left for me to do is cry. And write overly dramatic posts to HN, of course.

Miyamoto 13y ago
What is your very old browser? That bit of information might, you know, help Twitch web developers reading this.
- kleiba 13y ago
  Well, yeah, I already contacted them directly when my browser stopped working with the site and they pretty much said they can't support stone-old browsers. Can't blame them.

erickhill 13y ago

Strikes me that this could be an interesting acquisition target for Yahoo. They have the infrastructure and cash to support its growth. Twitch also has the added bonus of already being purple, too.