Twitch rides video game streaming wave to global success
tech.fortune.cnn.com
tech.fortune.cnn.com
Apparently their last real competitor, Own3D.tv, couldn't make good on payments owed to streamers and closed up shop. That should be a pretty good indicator about the profitability of this business model. Twitch has some interesting exclusivity deals with Xbox, PS4 and Mojang but forced ads for a Honda Civic I don't care about on the video preroll can't be paying their bills.
Twitch is still powered by venture capital, with their latest $20 million Series C round a few days ago. No doubt the exit strategy is to reach critical mass and then unload the business onto a company that can handle the bandwidth bills + stream partner payouts.
Most Twitch broadcasters are already using YouTube heavily as part of their income, just not for streaming. They upload highlights or other videos on their YouTube partnered channel.
On Profitability: In the gaming space, it's all about the sponsorships. Yes, Twitch ads are going to be nice cash for them, but I would ultimately expect their business to ride on helping promote company's gaming events.
Stream partner payouts are trash, pure and simple. Pull in 100,000 uniques over a month? You're not even eligible for partner status. On YouTube, you can get ~$300.00 for the same viewership. Somehow I don't think that partnerships are costing them much money at all.
Own3D.tv was only a "competitor" in the sense that they promised to pay out more to stream partners. They were full of lies. Several times Own3D.tv had big pushes to gobble up popular streamers from Twitch. I was contacted several times. Overall the Own3D.tv site was trash compared to Twitch's features, and the second you ask them the hard questions, "How often do you pay / When do I see my first paycheck", they couldn't answer you.
TLDR; Twitch will be profitable by keeping their costs down, building partnerships, and building brand recognition. Advertising isn't the end game for Twitch.
Twitch has "contracts" with a lot popular streamers.
> building partnerships, and building brand recognition. Advertising isn't the end game
Those two terms are exactly the same as advertising though.
Deleted comment
Also Azubu has streaming in Korea http://www.azubu.tv/index.do.
Europe is the place for someone to come in and fix their latency problems that Twitch causes.
Reposting here because parent deleted his comment.
I've been a gamer all my life and this game keeps hooking me -- I've been playing consistently for 3 years now.
Starts at 8pm PDT.
There are some interesting personalities on Twitch, some of the money a few claim to pull in is impressive. Fortunately personality and ability drive followings, having cleavage and a cute face will only get you so far.
Hey, does it not seem at all odd to you that he focused in on the stereotype that women trade on their looks in broadcasting, ignoring that men do the same? Does it not seem passing strange that he brought it up when nobody was talking about appearance in broadcasting in the first place? Like the thread wouldn't be complete without a negative comment on women?
If I randomly said, "Some women are gold-diggers," in a thread unrelated to gold-digging -- say, a thread about amicable divorce, which we have had on here before -- it would be a) true, b) irrelevant, and c) probably sexist. Do you understand that? If not, I would say you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy.
No, because on Twitch it is much more prominent for women, and even if it wasn't, there's a 50% chance for either.
> Does it not seem passing strange that he brought it up when nobody was talking about appearance in broadcasting in the first place?
No. People bring up new things all the time.
> Like the thread wouldn't be complete without a negative comment on women?
Sounds like a straw man argument. I don't think he or anyone else claimed that the goal of the comment was to "make the thread complete."
> If I randomly said, "Some women are gold-diggers," in a thread unrelated to gold-digging -- say, a thread about amicable divorce, which we have had on here before -- it would be a) true, b) irrelevant, and c) probably sexist.
I disagree with b) and c).
> Do you understand that?
I understand and disagree.
> If not, I would say you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy.
That sentence is preposterous, and inappropriately aggressive and accusatory. I'd prefer that you refrain from judging my "privilege" (which is a meaningless concept that just means "you're bad") and empathy levels when you have essentially no information about either.
The rest of your comment was pretty reasonable [1], but here you just went off the rails.
"Privilege" does not simply mean "you're bad". It's a specific sub-category of "different perspective" that is really important and useful in understanding many of the subtler aspects of social power imbalance.
So here's the question: do you care whether/that some broad groups of people are systematically harmed for reasons that are absolutely not their fault? If you don't care, well, I'm sad to hear that, but I think you can safely move forward without caring what "privilege" actually means. If you do care, you can't effectively think about this problem without knowing about privilege, and how it affects your thinking. For one thing, privilege is part of the problem directly. But even more important, privilege causes a type of cognitive bias that makes it harder to see the problem clearly. It's like not knowing about fundamental attribution error, or not knowing about confirmation bias.
[1] Although I personally respectfully disagree with much of your comment, I think it was mostly reasonable. And while I think jamesaguilar is more right than wrong, I think he made his case pretty poorly. And in particular, I agree with you that "If [you don't agree with me], ... you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy" was, as you say, inappropriately aggressive and accusatory.
Well, you just denied that privilege exists, and were unable to recognize a sexist comment as sexist. That gives me plenty of entropy to make a strong guess about how privileged you are.
Totally agree with others that you're building up the next ESPN.
And very likely to use ad-block. I wonder when Twitch finally starts baking ads into the actual of the stream.
What would be really impressive is getting the same level of targeting they can currently offer with flash-based ads by encoding the ad into the stream as part of their CDN... Sounds like a fun problem!
They fit the same demographic but are actually open to seeing your advertising.
(I'm stopping here, but I could go on a whole rant about the anti adblock nonsense)
Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_fe...
http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_...
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_rai...
Another interesting thing is that even if stream lags on highest quality, I'm still able launch multiple concurrent streams of second highest quality and none of them lag (I launched 5 streams, after which CPU usage maxes out, so I didn't try more). But watching a SINGLE stream on highest quality? Nop, not going to happen, while audio is fine, video stutters every 5-10sec, freezes for 2sec, rinse&repeat.
I have seen Twitch representatives essentially blame this on the ISPs/backbones. They say they try to make deals to secure bandwidth across backbones, but they're often just at the mercy of the big guys. The most well-known issue was with Time Warner, which was apparently solved later according to a Twitch blog post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_sh...
http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-t...
I don't have the numbers, but I'd bet that the audience for football (soccer) is growing faster in America over the past few years than the whole of e-sports.
Millions upon millions of dollars are being made so sure eSports is a big deal.
soccer has been around for most living people's entire lives, whereas esports only spans 1-2 generations at most.
The growth in soccer audience could be largely attributed to tech making it more accessible, whereas with esports people are completely new to the notion of competitive video games.
Until recently, that is. Unfortunately, they changed their interface recently and as an effect my obsolete browser can't render some of their content anymore. It's especially sad for me, not only because I'd still really like to be able to watch twitch.tv, but also because it all used to work fine until recently AND the sites in question do not contain anything magically: it's simply that people's profile sites don't work anymore. But these pages contain the lists of videos people uploaded and without these lists, there's nothing to watch :-(
Oh, well. Of course the solution is simple: upgrade. But as I said above, it's currently not an option for me. So all that's left for me to do is cry.
And write overly dramatic posts to HN, of course.
Twitch also has the added bonus of already being purple, too.