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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Is anything capable of disrupting Twitch at this point?

YouTube would be impossible to disrupt, but Twitch is ephemeral. So maybe if enough people got outraged?

If you want to beat Twitch, solve the discoverability problem.

Twitch provides absolutely no discoverability to streamers. It's purely a function of big gets bigger. They have zero design or plans to help streamers connect with the viewers who are interested in them (it's not "Playing Game X"). The primary way that Twitch streamers at 100+ viewers get new ones is via Youtube Clips + Twitter!

The first company to reasonably solve this problem will capture the lower 80% of Twitch's streamers.

Weirdly, YouTube has discoverability of normal videos nailed, but not for gaming streams either. There is tremendous opportunity here.

Twitch itself replaced HitboxTV, which was pretty much in Twitch's situation today: a de facto monopoly, and technical issues (they offered either the resource hungry Flashplayer or a semi-broken HTML5 implementation).

SO what will disrupt Twitch is the same thing as usual: a combo of a greedy company, a user experience that gets worse and worse, and a new tech coming out.

> a combo of a greedy company, a user experience that gets worse and worse, and a new tech coming out

Interestingly Youtube has 2 out of 3 - greedy company running ads every 3 minutes, and constant full screen badgering about cookies and sign-ups. I wonder what the new tech will be that will complete the set?

You don't think that PeerTube can do it ?

End users don’t care about decentralization — it’s not a feature, it’s an implementation detail. Unless PeerTube beats competitors on UX (both for viewers and creators), why use it?

Creators have been pissed off about ContentID for nearly a decade now, but until recently there wasn't a good enough alternative to YouTube.

PeerTube doesn't even help there, it just means that innocent end users will be hit with DMCA notices. In a way it's worse than BitTorrent because at least with BT you could make some kind of argument that end users knew they were doing something illegal (even if that argument was dubious). Now you'll have people visiting a website that looks a lot like Youtube and getting DMCA notices because of some background music in a video they were watching.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I think PeerTube is great technology and I hope it wins, I just don't think it has any chance of supplanting Youtube any time soon).

Has anyone visiting PeerTube been hit with a DMCA notice? I'm curious please provide any links you have to articles.

I doubt it's popular enough for any of these parasite legal companies to bother right now. That can change if it becomes popular. No I don't have any links.

Depending on the country, getting hit with a DMCA notice carries more or less weight. The ones sending the notice might also need to be very clear about what you did wrong. And a notarized letter is less easily prone to spam and abuse than a message inside YouTube's system. And you'll be probably able to win in court if the claim is spurious.

Much better than the current situation with YouTube's ContentID where the presumption of innocence is routinely violated, not to mention all the other issues : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trIn90HTqKs

(Also, the way the current ContentID might be violating European laws deriving from Article 13, but I haven't really been following that lately...)

Oh that's an easy one. The new tech is when YouTube invents a way to prevent adblocking.

Microsoft tried and failed, plus Facebook and Google never really got anywhere. The irony is most people on twitch are surprisingly unhappy with it and want a better alternative. The other thing to know is that twitch is still a significant money loser for Amazon.

Which is weird, because out of all of the platforms, Twitch keeps the biggest cut of ad revenue. They rate all ads at a fixed cost regardless the size of the streamer (which is bonkers). Twitch should have systems in place by now to make the most off an ad run on the biggest streamers, but they're doing a really poor job of it. Amazon does seem to be exerting some influence here to rectify this though (see recent metrics changes to Twitch APIs).

This actually leads me to believe that Twitch users are probably at like a 95%+ AdBlock install rate.

Like YouTube, Twitch is pretty good at bypassing adblockers.

I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad on either.

And also the main point was that Twitch does a terrible job at monetizing off their ads. They have the worst advertising platform.

Ads on Twitch run for all streamers. There's very little targeting capability and they strike individual deals for all ads on their system rather than purchase from a DSP.

Twitch takes a 30-50% cut of revenue from subs, which is an incredible money printing machine. Ads aren't there to make money for twitch. They're there to annoy users into subscribing.

As much as you're right here, you missed the point.

They're still struggling to make a profit.

Turns out their business probably needs both to work.

I don't think this is true at all. I think Amazon has realized they can't make twitch profitable just from subs, and are heavily pushing ads in order to try to fundamentally change how they make money with it. I also think Amazon, the entire company, is making a big push towards ads. Amazon is still terrible with ads, but I think this is one of the overarching themes of how the company is shifting focus in the near future.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/14/do-amazon-...

What you're saying is demonstrably true from recent attempts by Amazon to overhaul Twitch's ads platform.

Youtube would be theoretical able, if they get their shit together and fix their aweful attitude and technology. They have the size, the ability and money...but for some reason social services & user friendliness is a big blind spot for google and they regulary fail hard in that area. And this shows in youtube streaming-area which is so user hostile that it even has started to shrink now.

Youtube is Google owned.

Anything that is owned by Google won't improve but rather decline:

- search? Was at its best in 2007

- Reader? Killed after spending all the air in the rss market.

- Google+? Killed after they'd suffocated a few interesting alternatives.

- etc

(notable exception: after a decade they've actually stopped serving me insulting ads - but I do wonder if that wasn't Google but rather the advertiser who got whiff that Google sent their expensive "targeted" ads to everyone.)

It is possible. Here’s how:

- reach out to 20 biggest streamers on twitch and get them to agree to move to your platform, the same way spotify got Joe Rogan to move from YT to Spotify

- with signed agreements ready get funding

- build the platform, and all accompanying streamer tools, preferably fix all major issues that twitch has

- set the date for launch

- launch, with all your onboarded twitch streamers streaming “we moved to platform x” on their abandoned twitch channels

- profit

Note: this requires a few million USD, but it is definitely doable. In fact, YC could get a few investors and build this in a year, if they wanted to.

Isn't that what Mixer did, and failed?

Among others. It’s easy to beat twitch from a comment section, but well funded companies have tried and failed.

I like the formula, though I'd maybe instead aim for 200 mid tier streamers with good growth potential for the same money.

I think you're heavily underestimating necessary investment. I would say by a factor of 2 easily[1] in practice more like 3-4 because once you go in you want to have a decent chance of success. Also ignoring the fact that as soon as it starts working, you have Amazon on your back with much much deeper pockets than you to keep market of viewers acting irrational.

Anegdata, I just stopped listening to Joe Rogan, despite liking Spotify more than Youtube. I was on the fence anyway, I'm lazy and so on.

It seems to me that we're at the point where it takes the next generation of kids for a new service to get into a crowded space. Because popular people on the platform (it's always about these hubs, that you got right I think) just become older and less relatable.

1. https://checkpointxp.com/2020/12/17/highest-paid-twitch-stre... take into account that somebody likely paid for most pixels on the screen before they even start streaming

Mixer kind of tried to do the same thing and failed. Twitch is more of a community at this point and is really hard to disrupt. I follow more than a dozen streamers on twitch and one of them moving to another platform isn't much of an incentive for me to change my primary platform. If anything it's an annoyance.

Mixer and other big players tried this and failed, with tens-to-hundreds million usd spend involved.

The 20 biggest streamers alone would require well over 8 figures, possibly even 9 figures. Cloning Twitch's functionality would cost millions as well, as well as millions in monthly running costs. CDN bandwidth is not cheap.

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