With 34M+ Visitors a Month, Twitch Raises $8.3M in New Venture Funding | Hacker News Reader

With 34M+ Visitors a Month, Twitch Raises $8.3M in New Venture Funding

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52 pointsdmor23 comments

Gotta hand it to Emmett Shear for finding and doubling down on the one genuinely great use for live video streaming that exists today.

There was a lot of excitement and competition in live streaming from 2005 - 2008. In the end it all turned out to be a giant waste of energy and money. No one succeeded in a big way.

I'm not sure I buy the idea that "electronic sports" will be as big as Twitch thinks. I certainly don't think it will ever compete with real sports programming. I do think it's very real though and Twitch is a really great service that will continue to grow.

Maybe in another 10 years we'll find that there are two good uses for live streaming.

Thanks :-)

Side note: One thing people miss is that Twitch is a lot bigger than just eSports. It may create the flashiest, biggest events, but on a day-to-day basis most of our viewership is on stuff that's much more about interactive sharing than it is about competition.

we've come a lonnnng ways since the latenight bootleg korean starcraft stream watching days of the 2005-2008 era, and Twitch has helped make huge leaps forward. My life as a viewer has never been more convenient or filled with options.

Thanks from a former Team Liquid admin :).

How much of that is twitch's doing and how much is just increased foreign interest in the Korean Starcraft scene though? GomTV had an English stream through GOM player well before being forced to use Twitch by Blizzard, and OGN still half asses their foreign stream.

Maybe not for the Korean scene, however their move to Twitch wasn't forced by Blizzard, as they used Twitch for a while beforehand in periodic spots when their main site was having issues.

Blizzard DID force them to show it on twitch, which is great.

There are numerous other tournaments that wouldn't get the exposure they have today if it wasn't for Twitch.TV.

Google Glass will be the killer app for live streaming, but Youtube will probably benefit more from it than Justin/Twitch for obvious reasons (or it should unless the youtube team completely drops the ball, I have been very unimpressed by the pace of innovation at youtube).

Heh. I'm skeptical live streaming from Glass will ever become a thing many people do. Having some direct experience with it, most people just don't want to do personal live streams.

I would disagree for the most part when it comes to twitch. Games such as Stacraft have many small details happening at once that informed viewers wan't to be paying attention to, and on a small screen a lot of it blurs together. I've watched on my phone before and all of the small things escaped me despite knowing what to look for.

It's already quite strong and it's continually growing. Twitch doesn't need eSports to be bigger than the Super Bowl.

Twitch has one effect I wonder how many others figured out, it saves gamers money. By watching streamers play games I am interested in I have managed to save a good amount of money. It used to be I had to rely on word of mouth or worse, reviews. Now I can see the games in action. I can hear the enjoyment or frustration of the players.

I can see how game developers in turn can leverage it into more sales, there are many big names in Twitch and getting them to play your game is a great way to gain exposure. The risk of course is falling on your face in front of thousands.

So I am glad to hear they are getting more funding, they certainly changed how I select games to play, let alone what I keep in the background while working.

Had no idea justin.tv went through Y Combinator (then again, I'm pretty new 'round these parts)

As someone who likes following pro Starcraft and League of Legends, I really appreciate what Twitch gives us access to. I've heard people groaning about Twitch in favor of Own3d, but I never understood the negativity towards Twitch. I hope they keep it up.

After owned shut down, twitch is the only game in town.

Azubu is a major competitor, but Twitch is dominant.

YouTube seems to still be a secondary place to stash recordings of streams, but if they take the un-Googly step of actually courting streamers personally and sponsoring tournaments, they could make their streaming community more significant.

Azubu shut down and is not a competitor. Twitch is the only name in the game besides some random european streaming sites like motioncreds

Sorry, I don't mean to be contrarian, but it looks active to me: http://www.azubu.tv/channel/index.do

Do you mean that they had plans to have a wider base of users and have restricted themselves to just professional players?

Edit: I stand corrected; I'm not sure why the site is up but Azubu seems to have been owned by criminals/a front for criminal activity: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=406...

YouTube is starting to join the fray and has shown good performance so far. No idea how well they pay streamers compared to Twitch though, and I also haven't seen them sponsor a single team or tournament yet whereas Twitch sponsors pretty much everyone + dog.

Recently, Own3d.tv shut down. Twitch immediately picked up the slack, and many top-tier gamers started streaming there. Often, you can find top gamers getting 10k-20k viewers as they play games like League of Legends and Warcraft.

Warcraft (both WOW and WC3) are pretty much dead as far as esports go. Most have converted to Starcraft 2 which generally gets the highest viewers for individual streamers (10k is the highest you usually see for players like IdrA, Demuslim and Stephano) although League of Legends dominates live events.

I hace conflicting feelings on twitch. As a french user, some streams are just aweful to watch because of the lag. I'm speaking about Twitch's lag where all users even at 240p (sic!) have their video shuttering. I understand they can't treat each stream the same, like,thses LoL streams having 10k viewers versus a stream with 10. But video is not like text: you can't rely on the user just waiting a little more for a page to load while you are giving full bandwidth to the most popular one. Streams lagging on a streaming website have a much more negative effect.

Twitch lag is a big issue for most European viewers and I even get issues on the East Coast for big events (50k+ viewers). Their adds are another source of constant annoyance for me. They often pop up when their not suppose to, constantly ignore volume settings and crash the stream entirely from time to time. I've never had similar problems with youtube's streaming services and would be very worried for twitch's future if Google ever steps up their involvement .

I'm going to guess that Twitch.tv's integration into the Xbox One played a significant role in this: http://www.joystiq.com/2013/06/10/twitch-streaming-integrate...

If you dig around long enough on the Team Liquid forums you can find JTV's customer service that eventually won all of the business from Ustream and Livestream. Back in the summer of 2010 Ustream was the primary site for streaming sc2 tournaments/community stuff.

Emmett and Co. reached out to the community and won everyone over about a year before the rebrand as twitch.

This is kind've a shoutout to tl and the sc2 community that no doubt had a major role in snowballing twitch into what they are. Emmett keeping in close contact with the user base notwithstanding!

I really love this idea and hope it leads to a new generation of people making a living from broadcasting. I go to twitch occasionally just to see what people are up to. I've seen some funny personalities there.

That's it. I'm quitting my job and going to play minecraft. Someone sponsor me please.

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