Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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
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.
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)
One thing I'm sure is that it uses way less CPU and helps with my ISP throttling because anything 720p60 and above is a problem if I'm using a browser.
There are options to modify the buffer, reconnect and more but I almost never change my config except for hls-live-edge like once a year (for something that is not Twitch).
When the Dota International is on in August, I encourage you to boot up both Youtube and Twitch side by side and have a look at the visual quality at certain bitrates.
720p60 is fine on YouTube. 1080p60 on YouTube will stutter depending on what my girlfriend is doing on the Internet, but is watchable if I'm home alone.
Anything over 720p60 won't even try to start playing on Twitch.
Contrast that to running it in unstream (the windows app). Absolutely no problems. Hell I'm pretty sure my iphone can run the Source level streams better than Chrome on my macbook pro.
I hope the html5 player is the standard now.
Occasionally I can watch 720p just fine, but this is rare. I've resorted to watching tournaments like TI on YouTube, with the Twitch chat popped out for extra entertainment.
I have tried to watch the LoL LCS numerous times using Twitch over the years, with stuttering/lag making it unwatchable.
I solely watch it on Youtube now.
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.
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?
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.
I did the same with Overwatch, only to a much lesser extent - I personally didn't like what was available at the time.
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-b...
* https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pro...
* Streamers connect with their audiences, I can chat with them live - ask questions about the game or technique
* Streamers are entertainers. They joke, cry, rage with you. They are engaging people.
* Community. I'm a subscriber to person X, so are you!
* Skill. Streamers are often the best in the world at their games.
* Can't play now. Cooking? Folding laundry? Watch some twitch.
* Events. Exports, and charity events like games done quick are amazing.
* Discoverability. Finding a new game or a new streamer for a game I like is super easy.
How do you build a business? Some streamers have thousands of people paying them $5 a month. Twitch takes a cut. They show ads, they collect donations, they sell in game products and the games themselves. (Twitch splits the revenue for those with their streamers. ) It's powered by viewers and ad revenue, is what I'd guess.
>Who watches twitch?
This is easy enough to answer; gamers / game enthusiasts.
But then you confound it by asking:
>Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube?
I don't really follow at this point. I thought my post covered that; Twitch has great discoverability of live content, and so if I am trying to watch a CS:GO tournament, and they're all going to be on Twitch, I'll go to Twitch and watch...
If you're asking from a content-creator's perspective, I think I can answer that in one symbol: $
>But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun?
"Who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play sports for fun?" Is that a dissatisfying parallel for you, or does it sufficiently illuminate the point?
May be anecdotal, but many of my friends have the same mindset. Besides watching competitive eSports tournaments for specific games, usually someone will have a few streamers they will watch play anything.
For real though Twitch is <3 KappaPride
Watching competitive video games (starcraft 2 is my favorite) has a similar appeal, to me. If you don't watch any sports, than the appeal of esports may not make sense to you.
Of course, twitch is bigger than esports, but each viewer category has their own needs & content that fills them.
Regarding ads there's a few different ways it happens. Sometimes the stream itself will have ads, this is most noticable with Korean content when they start putting up ads for Korean ISPs or mobile apps. The other way ads happen is through the Twitch platform itself and these are what you're most likely used to seeing on YouTube. Targeting is okay but not the best, solvable problem though.
eSports might seem like a joke still but I guarantee that a lot of people don't feel that way and follow them in the same way that football teams are followed. It's entertainment like any other.
There's the trope of the younger sibling watching the older one play games, and it turns out that a lot of people enjoy that. You can watch for loads of different reasons:
* High-quality gameplay. Some of the most talented people in e-sports regularly stream, and most of the popular streamers are quite good generally.
* Introduction to games and critique. I definitely use Twitch to decide which games I'll buy and play.
* Streamer personalities. A lot of the streamers are very very good at what they do. They are funny and entertaining, can tell stories, and generally cultivate a community around their stream. They play off the drama of what they play (a big part of why battle royale games are so popular). It's weird how much watching a stream can feel like hanging out with friends.
It's one of those things where you might not understand unless you give it a try, and certainly not everyone will love it, but it's so damn compelling. I predict really big things for Twitch.
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.
That being said, there are very few (are there any?) other companies out there that would be capable of creating as much parity across platforms as Google has, so even though there are still problems, I still salute them for their efforts.
What a silly idea; why would anyone want to do that?
Works fine from desktop, so +1 for consistency. /s
Took me 15 minutes to find the damn thing again. :p
I guess you can see how that's not entirely YT's fault, but that doesn't make the end-user experience any better.
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.
>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 [1]: http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-lea...
I do agree that the split has impacted CS:GO, but a few new releases have shaken up the top tiers. (Player Unknown's Battlegrounds for instance.)
You can get the source here: 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.
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.
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.
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.
There are exclusives for the Nintendo consoles that depend on their wacky hardware. There are more PC exclusives than all the other systems combined for many reasons: no cost to release, no cost to update, no online service costs, vastly superior compute power, unrestricted machine access, and special peripheral support (e.g. HOTAS for flight sims) which combines to enable lots of smaller, niche games to come out on PC.
Paid exclusives suck. They exist purely to make companies happy because it forces people to buy what they don't already have or need and it makes the people who construct their identity around a brand happy because they have something other people cannot have.
Not really. Actually, not at all. It is a terrible excuse for Nintendo, who I think is one of the worst offenders in the gaming space at using exclusivity to drive hardware sales and lock in.
The Wii Mote, for example, has been fully supported on PCs since about 2008 - a year after it came out. And there were probably beta drivers dating back to its release. It uses bluetooth, after all, its just an HID device. You can easily ship a game for PC that requires that controller.
Since their Wii U pad was just a dedicated computer that communicated over wifi (proprietary, I think?) with the base console, that kind of logic code can be ported anywhere. It just requires a server that converts the pads touch events and controls into a local touchscreen + joypad with haptics and gyros. Every major OS supports these, and has since well before the Wii U came out.
And don't get me started on the Switch. It is just an Android tablet (and the worst part is Nintendo stopped Nvidia from releasing a much needed Shield Tablet 2 because it would have just been a literal Switch without the controller parts included for half the price in exchange for using their SoC) with attachable joystick pieces. Again, every OS can support this input style, and any game can require it.
Nintendo has invested in manufacturing and distributing really shitty computers (since the Gamecube every Nintendo console has been underpowered compared to the average PC and was way behind its contemporary consoles) and writing a giant proprietary freedom-hating set top OS for them that uses proprietary APIs that are non-portable for developers to target for what I believe no reason than power hunger. There isn't even a profit motive in it - they make a tiny amount of money per console sold, nobody ships games on their systems anymore so they aren't getting any licensing money, and the vast majority of their income is from first party sales. But their first party titles only ever support their shitty hardware. It means they are dramatically reducing their potential audience of $60 pure profit releases per box (and their games have ravenous fans, even those that cannot afford a redundant $300 piece of junk) to move console units that don't make any money. The only reason to do that is because that is what you have always done. So you keep doing it, because you are addicted to having that level of control, even when it doesn't have a business benefit. It is pretty stupid.
He was talking about games, not the hardware itself, I think.
Warning, slow links: [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/06/facebook-to-provide-login... [2] http://www.wowhead.com/news=255393/blizzard-and-facebook-str... [3] http://www.wowhead.com/news=260084/battle-net-and-facebook-f... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371440 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381447
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-radio-episode-2-...
I am a big Hearthstone fan so I enjoy watching the competitions sometimes. It's been consistently the highest viewed Blizzard game on Twitch for a long time now so it's important to bring up in this discussion.
PlayHearthstone[1] is the official channel for Hearthstone events so you would think it would be representative of how Blizzard wants to operate in the competitive space. Whether it is due to technology, lack of oversight, or simply not caring, Twitch chat is notoriously atrocious; rampant with trolling, vitriol, spamming, and terrible behavior.
To make things worse, there's absolutely no consistency with how events are moderated, if they are at all.
For one event, members are banned for simply asking questions, or providing constructive criticism to the casting of the event with mods creating trigger phrases or words that lead to users getting banned immediately without knowing why. For other events, the chatters are allowed to use all manner of racial, sexual, demeaning, and outright threatening and horrific text towards the casters, the events, and the participants.
It's disgusting to watch, completely unprofessional, and something that has been brought up multiple times by the community with no concrete resolution.
Either Blizzard finds it acceptable, Twitch finds it acceptable, or they haven't figured out how to do well in moderating live chats with thousands of people.
Given their track record, I'm hesitant to be excited about the exclusivity.
So many games and communities have been killed by topdown approach to content moderation.
It's tricky. If someone in chat is spamming ANELE ITS JUST A CLOCK BRO ANELE, it certainly has racial connotations, but is the statement itself racist? I don't know. I don't like it but I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable with someone being banned from chat because of t.
I doubt he would be as embarrassed if commenters spammed 88, as opposed to more openly, well known racist terms. If they want to speak in a secret code, then there's already a long history of racists doing that which isn't unique to online.
Realistically how different is this than people going on /b/ just to type the N word? MingLee spam whenever there is an Asian on screen, TriHard HE SAID IT when someone says 'nei ga' in Mandarin on a Chinese cast or ANELE spam when someone of Indian/Middle East descent is on screen etc. etc.
If streamers want to moderate chat some way, let
them do it
This is surely the case. Blizzard has tried various moderation techniques as you have mentioned and they don't seem to work. If I watch streams on twitch I don't look at chat ever (mobile/tablet).
And that's the beauty of it, they don't need to convince you. They're already winning. Your suggestions would kill the soul of the platform.
They can definitely improve upon it by message-limiting and message-length limiting (maybe they already do that? I always disable the chat)
Really, the people who care about the chat I imagine are under 20 and hence take internet communication with strangers seriously. I had great fun in my day being a total dipshit online while playing computer games, it was part of the fun for me.
What they can do is have multiple chats, some free-for-all, some moderated, etc. Except, I don't know who's running Twitch but they could've done a thousand and one things to improve their platform and I haven't seen anything, so. It is what it is :)
It's frankly plenty good enough for me. I've written an app for iOS that lets me know when more than X number of people are watching a game (GameWhen on iOS App Store) I'm interested in so I don't miss the big tournaments, outside of that, the streams don't lag, the tournaments are bigger than ever, life's good :)
$(".chat-container").remove();
You can close the chat window if you want, but I'm normally watching things where the streamer is engaged with the chat and volume is fairly low.
I will say, in the circles I move in, many content creators are also running a discord along side twitch. Some will even invite people into their voice chat to talk with them on stream.
I much prefer using discord in those situations, but that may be partly due to the higher barrier to participation that using discord immediately entails.
And if you for some reason want to participate in chat, there is irc.twitch.tv, where you can simply join channel #streamname in IRC client of your choice, again without all the web crap, and without all the inane twitch emotes.
I've been doing that for a few years now, much more pleasant experience than their web interface.
You've got to consider the target audience for video games like HearthStone, as well as the amount of users that will be there.
No amount of "moderation" will solve that. Ever. If you expect a good conversation with tens of thousands of people at once... you need to adjust your expectations.
Certainly you're right that if I go watch a random stream of a match full of teenagers I shouldn't expect the chat to be mature.
But should I expect that chat to be racist, or sexist? Should I resign myself to that? I don't think so. There is a difference between a conversation that is immature and a conversation that is, say, racist.
Try moderating, in real life, 10000 people talking at once.
Impossible.
If you're just there for the game: watch the game and hide the chat (there's a button right next to it).
If you're there for a good conversation: you're in the wrong place. There's 10000 people there.
Does Twitch have a policy against racism in their chat? Yes. Do they enforce it? No. I'm not suggesting they moderate 10,000 people talking at once: I'm suggesting they target their enforcement to encourage people to stop...which is what's done in real-life sports today.
Even if it was, citizens of China and Europe (e.g. France) are far more racist than the United States and no law can change that.
That's the big difference with an in-person event.
Anyway, I'd rather have 10,000 racist people in my Twitch chat than one special person who has to be guarded from hearing anything that offends them. People who constantly need to be guarded are doing way more harm than good for society IMO.
Also, that type of moderation never works the way it's intended. I've been to plenty of sporting events where I've heard racist remarks from people that didn't get in trouble for it.
E-Sports have global marketing teams that drive viewership. Having to ban thousands... no matter what the tools, there will be collateral damage.
Only way to fix that is to charge for chat attendance - an option Twitch already offers with subscriber only mode.
Sometimes but not always.
> Having to ban thousands
This is a massive exaggeration, the number of people driving cancerous chat is quite small.
> Only way to fix that
Citation needed. It seems to me there are plenty of things twitch could do to contain chat cancer besides subscriber mode.
Always. Even if it's just because this crowd is anonymous, and didn't have to pay to gain access. So they behave differently because there's 0 investment.
> This is a massive exaggeration, the number of people driving cancerous chat is quite small.
It's not. I moderate channels with between 10 and 12500 concurrent viewers. Around 5000 there is a turning point where chat becomes difficult to manage, and above 7500 it becomes nigh impossible unless you have subscriber only mode on, which effectively cuts the audience down to a small percentage.
For reference, have a look at channels like https://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp (not one where I moderate) which is full of constant spam. That's also how the hate and racism filled chats work. One person does it, and if they get banned, there's EXTRA incentive for others to post the same spammy lines. Herd mentality takes over.
> Citation needed.
Alright, perhaps not the only way, but the only one I've seen work so far, in similar situations. Would love to hear the other ways though.
Currently, "charging for chat access" is the only method Twitch offers that actually works. It ensures people have something invested in the channel which you can take away.
The only other way is censorship, manually (admin/moderator corruption is a huge issue already for Twitch) and programatically (this WILL go wrong too).
.edit: coming back and thinking about this a bit - perhaps there's a way to only allow accounts "in good standing" (above X rating) to post in these chatrooms. How X is determined would be up for discussion.
Thanks for continuing this discussion, it's brough me some light that I might use elsewhere by making me think through this more than I otherwise would've!
You seem to be oblivious to teenagers using racism, or really anything that is considered offensive, for the sake of being edgy, whether they share those opinions or merely don't care either way.
This is quite evident in 4chan culture. For example "nigger" is used anywhere from positive ("my nigger", "nigger earned his bike") to a catch-all insult ("fuck off nigger"). Similarly the suffix -fag (from faggot) is used in the same way -person could be used. newfag is an insult to throw at people who stick out from the crowd due to lack of subcultural knowledge while drawfag is a neutral to positive term describing anonymous artists creating original content with their skills.
Whenever business and banking is the topic then the involved people will be called jews, regardless of whether they're actually of jewish descent.
"two nukes were not enough" will even be used on boards that actively consume japanese culture to express a very low opinion of something particular.
I don't get why people get so worked up about racist and sexist insults specifically. They are just easy to use because they target large groups. Simply calling people retarded is a classic, but yet far fewer people bat an eye over it using disabled people as a negative. Country stereotypes are also a thing. Anyone with brown skin or near-eastern clothing will be called a mudslime (muslim). Why? Because the group is large. Nobody is going to use satanist as an insult, simply because the group of satanists is tiny and nobody will care to get worked up to defend them.
I'm not saying there are zero racists among the audience. It's just that there is a non-zero and potentially large fraction of what you're perceiving as racism is actually just people spamming things for shits and giggles. In other words, it's immature. It's easy because it offends many people.
To adapt hanlon's razor: Never attribute to hatred that which is adequately explained by indifference and edginess.
On a less confrontational note, I think options for moderation should lie with the individual streamers, not twitch as a platform. But then people call on the streamers to use those tools and at that point I think it should be noted that faulting them over "not doing enough" is silly. Moderating chat is not their raison d'être. And it's just chat. Maybe they are just indifferent or have other priorities than those who demand a different atmosphere.
At some point chat starts moving so fast that people can't have decent conversations anyway, at that point its value drops a lot where someone might simply not care.
And for the viewers twitch probably should make it easier to disable and hide chat completely. If they deem it not useful or even offensive it should take just a single click to remove it and use that space for the video instead.
I'm talking about website (sub-)communities. Different places have different standards, and frictions between communities can be seen as a turf conflict, an invasion.
(I am always amazed how typing "when game starts?" results in couple of whispers and (at) mentions with polite answers even in most crowded chats.)
aka twitch chat
Perhaps optional or opt-out filters should be in place or something. I also watched the Hearthstone finals last year and the racism did bother me quite a bit, but it's hard to argue whether something should be done, or what that would be.
It's also a super fascinating study in how memes and culture evolves. The memes slowly morph and take on different forms, it's seriously like watching evolution before your eyes. So interesting. The anarchy is what makes this.
The problem you are describing is easily solved by simply joining a different chat room while watching the stream. For example: I'm a member of more than one "<streamer name> civil-chat" chat room which I can hop over to if the main stream chat is a bit too cancerous for my veteran eyes.
Echoing sibling comment sentiments about enforcing a top-down moderation policy: it's a bad idea. One of the most important things that watching Twitch and playing online games with notoriously toxic communities has taught me is that fun is unmotivated.
If you don't understand how someone derives pleasure from an action you find repulsive, it's because you're not meant to. Stop considering other's motivation and suddenly it becomes much easier to enjoy yourself, now that you're not raging at how dumb everyone is.
This isn't a great analogy. Twitch doesn't use physical violence against people chatting on their website. The normalization of racism and bigotry through ironic edginess has much more potential to cause real-world violence than chat moderation.
edit: this isn't agreeing with the parent poster, as a police state is about the level of control, not whether violence is used which is a fact of policing anyway.
https://blog.twitch.tv/moderators-are-the-sword-now-automod-...
Doubtful. Where is Twitch if not in the west?
Your post doesn't contradict that, but it seems somewhat important context for anyone who isn't aware since the post mentions both Twitch and Amazon but not the link between the two.
And that stream was an unwatchable crap with crap video quality, skipping issues and IIRC awfully low views.
Even now if you find a VOD of that stream, and check HD, it's completely shit video quality makes it unwatchable, since you can't even distinguish the icons on the interface from one another.
No surprise about this Twitch deal.
On that note, I still don't know what version/patch the competitive community wants to use going forward, either.
It's the same issue Netflix competitors have. They need to get everywhere fast.
But as of about a month ago twitch now blocks chromecast.
I can no longer watch twitch on my TV and I hate that fact. And no I'm not going to buy a 'fire stick', I don't like being manipulated into buying something when it previously worked well and has been deliberately downgraded.
BTW, did you try any technical workaround?
I haven't found a way around this in the months I have had it and half the time I use the youtube app and watch a pre-recorded game instead.
Hmm, okay, it goes to an article that cites another source. The BBC? Reputable source, so here's the deal:
>Esports generated $493m (£400m) in revenue in 2016, with a global audience of about 320 million people.
So yeah, that's an aggregate of all of 2016. Let's compare it to the highest watched Super Bowl on record - Broncos vs. Seahawks: 111 million US viewers. In ONE DAY.
Yes I understand that I'm skewing pretty hard, but even the worst Super Bowl viewing in modern times pulled 39 million or so.
My point is that yeah, eSports looks like it has some numbers, but I work in a high rise building full of financially successful people that are desired marketing targets and I have little doubt barely 0.01% of them watch eSports.
Or, if I want to be a real jackass about it, I could just call eSports the equivalent of K-Pop. The numbers are there to show it's popular, sure. It's just not the target market for millions of dollars of advertising budget for US eyes.
It's a new(ish) platform whose demographic (people who enjoy video games) is growing larger every year. Today's 40 and 50 year olds don't play nearly as many games as the next decade's will. Whether or not they can wrangle that into marketing $$$ is another story.
2016 Basketball Worlds Final Game: 31M viewers 2016 Baseball Worlds Final Game: 40M viewers 2016 League of Legends Worlds Final: 43M viewers
So, okay. eSports isn't quite at the American Football level. But, it right in line with the other top broadcast sports
It's not on the level of the NFL's 13+ billion dollars a year, but it's certainly nothing to laugh at. Keep in mind that Amazon purchased Twitch for almost 1 billion dollars.
There is a stigma in some circles that video games are for kids and adults maybe won't admit in a work environment that they play/watch because it may sound unprofessional?