Large streams are more expensive but those get the subs. Ad revenues they are also splitting but they play 3 minutes of ads that interrupts the entire content every 10 minutes.
Large steams do amortize cost while the bandwidth cost is somewhat scaling per viewer there are other cost which scale per used resolution and per region the stream is streamed to. So on a per-view bases large streams are often not the most expensive. But very small streams with viewers across continents have the highest per-view cost.
AD revenue is split but the main problem is Twitch ADs are not worth much and a bought way to little, often leading to no ADs playing at all for many (non US) regions.
>they play 3 minutes of ads that interrupts the entire content every 10 minutes.
They do not (typo?), it's depending on the streamers setup but ADs are normally more in the 3min per hour basis which is fine to be honest. There are sometimes some additional banner ads but they don't cover the content, don't "play" and are not that disruptive. And there is Twitch Turbo which disables all ADs but streamers still get the AD money. Through that isn't worth it's money for a lot of people.
It’s “unfair competition” for a company to use its own servers to host its own business?
Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?
You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?
and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.
When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO.
(Former AWS employer)
And when I went to my phone tool, he still reported to Bezos at first
Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere.
Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable".
The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money.
Twitch is doomed.
Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.
The citation below isn’t entirely true, internal departments aren’t charged “retail” prices. But they are charged and if you have multiple accounts opened testing different releases of an open source “AWS Solution” in multiple regions that uses the then $5K a month Kendra service along with largish ElasticSearch, you will show up on the naughty list (ask me how I know)
I’m no longer an employee if AWS
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th...
> When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams
YouTube is break even and imagine how much content is uploaded and stored there per second, forever. Twitch VODs are deleted after 2 months. Most streamers don't even get any viewers. Those that get viewers get people paying real money on top of ad spam. The numbers don't really add up like how Amazon often pays $0 in tax.