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Comment by reddozen | Hacker News Reader

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>Dan Clancy is totally ok with his contracted streamers constantly live streaming terrorist training videos

who is streaming terrorist videos?

you say it like everyone is, but i have never seen one myself. not that i watch all of the big streamers, but i definitely watch some of the biggest streamers on the platform and have no idea what you are referencing.

no comment on the political bits, but the fact that 80% of twitch is streaming to themselves cant be cheap to run

I do wish they would revamp their discoverability process

I think there's a big "control premium" attached to these things. Not necessarily even that they will manipulate and censor rampantly, but that they could, I think the market prices highly.

Twitch gets a big cut of individual creators’ subs, and I’d bet most people that stream also sub to other channels. Keeping people in the ecosystem is probably worth it, even if there’s some amount of “freeloading”.

do you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?

It's important that they have a proper budget and pay near the sticker price that way they can play accounting games to make Twitch look unprofitable.

honestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running

Well, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.

I mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?

youre still encoding to like, 4 different formats and pushing bytes to a cdn for 80k+ streams in real time. I think the actual serving of hls chunks is the cheap part

Transcoding is only guaranteed for twitch partners, and the cdn doesn't actually distribute the video to a given datacenter until at least one viewer using that datacenter requests it.

ya but 99% of streamers have their stream up in their dashboard or on a side monitor, so its always going to be sending and transcoding something

Twitch can forward the stream as is without transcoding it. That's what transcoding not being guaranteed means. It will be a worse experience for viewers but it can work. Few years ago they even announced working with OBS on feature where streamers themselves can transcode and send multiple streams further reducing need for twitch to spend their compute resources on unprofitable streamers.

That feature exists by now, called "Enhanced Broadcasting".

In addition to the other reply, forwarding to one region in the cdn is not the same as forwarding to every region.

Maybe they just don’t do that if you don’t have any streamers.

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