YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion?
variety.com
variety.com
Miraculously, this could end up making YouTube comments even worse.
I play an MMORPG called Runescape which has millions of players, I've been playing it since I was 12 and now I'm 21. I stream on Twitch once every few days and frequently have 1,000+ people watching me, subscribing, following and most importably putting eyeballs on Twitch's adverts (which is one of the largest concurrent none-featured community.)
If this happens I lose my anonymity (because Google+) which protects my account details from being stolen. If this happens I lose the ability to stream while playing music in the background, my followers even have the ability to request songs during the stream using an automated service, where does this leave me with regards to copyright then?
Even worse than this though is that if this happens, Google will in some way fundamentally change a service which I and my followers love to use - a service which they don't understand.
I speak for myself as a well known member of this community: If Google buys Twitch, Twitch will die.
This video basically (and very explosively) explains the current thinking of Twitch users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loeFYdbvrZM (turn down your sound)
Nobody wants to worry about this stuff.
As long as the purpose of the stream is not just streaming music i don't see the problem however I'm certain the MPAA and RIAA would not agree.
Beside if you always play the usual 200 songs you listen to when are you going to find new songs to listen to.
Listening to music is a group activity a lot of the times and you find new songs by doing it.
There's only 3 ways to find new songs and 2 of them suck
1. Listening to top hits in hopes that a few match your taste
2. Using recommendation algorithms on Spotify and other streaming sites
3. And the on that give you the best results hanging out with like minded people in real life or on the internet and seeing what their listening to.
So the answer to the question "Why do you have to use copyrighted background music for streaming of a game" is "Because playing a game with the volume at zero kind of sucks".
edit: And obviously that's not the entirety of the concern; there are definitely some streamers who play essentially radio music (or anime music or whatever) over the soundtrack on broadcast. I agree that stuff like that doesn't necessarily need to happen. But using a broad brush to say "No broadcasting copyright music on twitchtube" is both not a good idea, and exactly what people are worried will happen.
why do you expect to be able to broadcast copyrighted music for your own enrichment without paying the copyright holder?
Buying music (I assume that is what you meant), will not let streamers use it, thus there is no meaningful solution as of yet.
Legally using copyrighted music is not exactly an impossible task. I mean, it's basically the entire business of some radio stations, and some stations are quite small.
Now, is it worth the effort and cost for a Twitch stream? It depends on how much value the music brings. There's also CC or royalty-free music, if a streamer just wants some music playing.
If you want music but you don't want to purchase rights, there is plenty of creative commons licensed music available.
The ways they've handled the tournaments have really disillusioned many streamers. I don't know if there's any better way for them to have dealt with the scaling problems they faced as I can only imagine the work that must go into supporting a live stream, with real time chat, that has 100k+ viewers (and for some of the bigger tournaments that's a small number). Something like a 30s+ delay in the stream makes it very difficult to have real interactions between the streamer and the viewers which is particularly bad for smaller streams. For the big guys it doesn't matter as much since their interaction is less back-and-forth and more broadcaster in style and there's absolutely no interaction with the tournaments.
The point is that if this is true it really doesn't surprise me at all. And whether or not it is I think there's definitely an opening for some serious competition to Twitch by making a service that is essentially an exact copy but from a business focus standpoint caters more towards the small-to-medium sized streamer and their audience.
It's a smart move for Google.
So whether it be for removing a competitor and/or entering a new market, my point is I think a company like Google would have considered copyright issues before doing something like this.
And maybe Elephants will sprout rocket jets and fly into the dark side of Pluto.
What I'm also worried about is design changes. YouTube had some poor decisions in this domain and if Twitch experiences stuff like this, it may turn to a rather unpleasant platform.
I was wondering if it would be possible to create a set up where people can stream from home without any third party in between. Is that even possible for larger audiences?
Or some sort of peer-to-peer Popcorn time style (Bittorrent Live?[1]) that can distribute the load across all viewers.
Hmm... "Twitch-Time" may be an interesting way to resurrect that service.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/15/5414430/bittorrent-live-mo...
It inherently increases latency.
Twitch has taken down streams of unreleased games (which is fair because Twitch makes this rule very explicit), but that's still on an ad hoc basis.
I ended up creating 3 pages in g+ for my channel that I don't even use, when trying to avoid G+ Youtube integration.
Then I just gave up and merged them.
Makers of (gaming-related) content for YouTube – worried about the future of YouTube – have often already been relying on Twitch to provide them some stability, to stand on more than one leg. This competition also insured that YouTube couldn’t do literally anything. Makers of content had a place to go if things didn’t work out.
This is a potentially great move for Google and more specifically YouTube, but I don’t see any upside for anyone else (ignoring those profiting from the sale for the moment).
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As a side note: most of my friends are LoL fans, and I seriously believe professional gaming will be one of the major professional sports in the next few years, perhaps on the level of Hockey. They're super normal, social, extroverted people - yet they'll interrupt a trip to make us watch a LoL match on Twitch. They all came of it independently too.
I really believe Twitch could have been a big, independent company. They did what they thought was right and I NEVER want to be that guy that craps on acquisitions, but I wish this one hadn't happened. I was rooting for Twitch big time. Still, very happy for them, hope YouTube does this right! I assume if everyone doesn't Riot (pun intended) the technical chops at YouTube will actually make Twitch a much more pleasant place.
As a user of Twitch, I do not want this to happen. As a person with common sense, if I had an acquisition offer for $1 billion on the table, I'd sell out so freaking fast.
There is, of course, that network neutrality issue in the US.
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Here's the value of Snapchat: Social interaction without the paper trail.
For years people have been talking about the experience of today's youth who will, by the time they are 20, have thousands of old posts and tweets and blogs and instagrams. How many people have lamented the way these might come back to haunt you 10, 15 years later? It's a warning I gave my (much younger) sister when she got on Facebook at age 13.
Snapchat solves that. Snaps can be saved, sure, but you won't leave the paper trail you do on Facebook.
I personally doubt Snapchat will be a future blue chip on its own. But if they hit a hundred million users... well, we're living in a WhatsApp world. Based on the latest numbers I've seen, I'd guess they're about half way there. If growth is continuing in 2014 the way it was in 2013, they could see 100+ MM in a year.
How did you manage to outplay the dozens of very smart, very experienced, and very successful VCs and investors that have spent dozens of man-hours thinking about whether they should or should not dump millions of dollars into Snapchat? You are aware, that, as of now, Snapchat has raised more than $100M total in funding, from initial seed to it's Series C, and that some of the biggest players in SV have offered to buy it for upwards of $4B? I'm quite shocked to see that your little quip regarding it's long-term potential has somehow out-qualified all of this money and time and thought that went into it's current state. Especially since investors value long term potential over everything else : the whole deal with economics is finding value before anyone else does, otherwise you're just a bandwagoner. Early bird gets the worm, so the most successful early birds are those that look the furthest for the worms with the highest long-term potential.
They berated Google for making a bad decision when they acquired YouTube and they called Facebook a trend that was just "MySpace for college kids". Maybe you're not in the right demographic for using Snapchat, so that's why you don't see it's long-term potential?
You're probably dealing with a lot of confirmation bias.
If not, you're probably going to pull statistical data regarding the dot com bust. Failed companies during the dot com bust were a lot different than Snapchat. They had no users and were funded by clueless empty suits who thought that business success was the combination of a half-assed idea you thought up during dinner and waaay too many code monkeys working on your terrible idea with a forced deadline.
That's not what Snapchat is. Large amounts of funding from very respected investors with high success rates of investment in companies with a lot of users ... show high correlation with success.
Snapchat has a shit ton of users, runs pretty lean cost-wise (low amt of employees, small offices, efficient database/server management, etc.) as any tech company worth a shit these days will run (compared to dot coom bust, that is), continuously rolls out updates and features, and has a lot of funding. All of these very important factors when discussing a company's success.
For every example of a company that has failed with 1. had a shit ton of users, 2. didn't blow it's money on stupid shit like Aeron chairs and way too many employees (as companies during the dot com bust did), 3. has rapid development, and 4. has a lot of funding, there are 1000 companies that has succeeded like that. That's because those things are pretty good determinants of success.
User data is the current currency in Silicon Valley.
When you can't charge users for GET requests and everyone in the nation is too reluctant to spend a penny on iOS apps, the only real source of income for companies that focus on web/mobile markets is advertisement. So you work on optimizing ROI for advertisement. One way of doing such is optimizing user data analysis. Know your users' demands better -- their location, their demographic, their interests -- advertise stuff they're more likely to click on, get paid more by ad agencies. In order to analyze user data, you need, 1. "analyze" : accurate and thorough aggregation algorithms (I'm speculating that this is why Google bought Deep Mind and Zuckerberg/Thiel invested in Vicarious), and 2. "user data" : shit tons of raw data regarding your users.
And companies with a lot of users have a lot of user data. Even if Snapchat advertises ephemerality, they're really storing all of those pics on their database after they're deleted client-side (why else would servers even exist, there's no reason, technically, something like Snapchat couldn't work in pure P2P if you're really getting rid of the user data). Not to mention the metadata regarding your phone number and your friends list. While the first bit of advertisement optimization -- "analyze" -- may seem like it's not good enough at analyzing pictures and social graphs (your friends and your friends' friends and your friends' friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends that happen to be in your friends and also your friends' friends, etc.) just yet, 1. this is why AI is becoming so popular, and 2. this is the risk the VC is taking by investing in Snapchat. Obviously every sound investment takes some risk, or else it'd be so objectively obvious that everyone would make the investment and you wouldn't get a high ROI.
The risk here is saying "user data in the form of pictures and social graphs, and whatever something like Snapchat can reasonably evolve into if we keep it surviving" is valuable.
What you're saying when you say "large amounts of funding have historically shown little correlation with success", you're talking about clueless, unexperienced investors saying that "my vague business idea when paired with hundreds of programmers and really expensive Aeron chairs is valuable".
Not only is the former much more believable, given the high success of companies that, 1. initially seemed like useless toys to short-sighted people on the Internet, but had a SHIT TON of users and a very fast development cycle and 2. gone from no-revenue to some-revenue YEARS after initial success, this is also a prediction being made by motherfucking Andressen-Horowitz.
So, no, I'd say cases like Snapchat have HIGH correlation with success. Sorry you don't have anyone to sext.
After seeing this headline, I can't help but think that the power of networks is real, as is the results of deliberate, focused dedication to one's direction and craft. Pretty awesome stuff, congratulations!
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230442270...
I can a fairly substantial move away from it if Youtube begin applying the policy that removes all audio, if even a snippet of something copyrighted is detected.tracks for
Google near monopoly on online video market bugs me though, community at large would benefit from multiple players and more competition.
Much as I don't play football anymore but still watch it, I also follow some games :) and so do many friends in their late 30s / 40s with families (mostly the same ones as others in the thread, like Magic: The Gathering, League of Legends, Hearthstone, etc.).
Not that I'm saying the market won't grow - on the contrary, I think it will continue to do so. It's a very small market compared to sports generally ($1 billion would barely buy you a top class sports team, let alone a network like ESPN).
Famous last words.
Most of the time the biggest streamers put their chats in sub mode (paying supporters) to avoid it.
The "character" of the Twitch chat is valuable. The manically insane hivemind, with all the juvenilia and "shittiness" that is inherent to it, is a roiling primordial stew of genuinely worthwhile culture. It's the birthplace of memes in both the vulgar sense and the higher sense of that word, and, to me, feels like 4chan in its early days. The ecstatic chaos of the chat during an unmanageably large event is a unique and deeply valuable thing.
It was why Twitch Plays Pokemon was such a massive phenomenon. Channels which set their chats to subscriber-only mode are shooting themselves in the foot.
I've always desperately craved a comparable live mass chat experience for non-gaming-related events, eg during a football game, or a televised cultural event or major news story.
I think both chat modes (sub and free for all) have their place and time. I enjoy chats that are put into sub-mode, just to read a sensible conversation and have the streamer answer interesting questions, that she otherwise wouldn't have picked up on. On the other hand, some stream chats live off of the chaos that is twitch chat.
If you are watching a match with 100k people on Twitch of course there isn't going to be any valuable back and forward in chat but the chat stream as a whole adds to the experience.
I worry if they tried to roll it into youtube that it would turn people away. Their numbers are pretty dependent on a small number of League/ Dota/ Hearthstone and a few other games casters and steamers.
Youtube on the other hand, while available, have worked quite good.
Will I still be able to see Twitch streams on my PS4? Blergh.
I hope that if this is true, it's a feature that YouTube will copy and not one that will be disabled in the future.
But in all seriousness, shouldn't it just say the original title - "YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion: Sources". The Sources implying it's not publically confirmed, right?
I suppose I should mention that I have zero information about this, other than what's appeared on HN.
I would argue that if twitch got big enough, they would have to deal with the same issues YouTube does today.
To be honest, I'm surprised MSFT didn't try to buy them first.
1 billion USD seems somewhat low considering Snapchat was valued at 3.5 billion, and I'm pretty sure their revenues are non existent in comparison to Twitch's revenues.
But something more realistic is they buy Twitch and then integrate it into YouTube so everyone has to use YouTube to stream everything. Smart.
Yeah. I call this just a rumor.
I'd find it really helpful if I could point to a database showing that Variety or WSJ had a 90%+ accuracy in predictions like this, whereas another site might have a 50% accuracy.
From a 3rd party summary: "...Kenneth Ahern at the University of Southern California and Denis Sosyura at the University of Michigan, reviewed 2,142 articles written about 501 rumors between 2000 and 2011. Of those rumors, only 167 were followed by a public bid for the company. The Wall Street Journal was the most prolific publisher of such articles, with 158 during the time period. It was followed by Dow Jones Newswires with 67 and the New York Times with 38.
“The rumors published in the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service are also more accurate than the average rumor, with accuracy rates of about 39%, compared to 33% for the average rumor,” wrote the researchers. “In contrast, the Los Angeles Times and NYT Blogs have accuracy rates less than 20%.”
> Google’s YouTube has reached a deal to buy Twitch
This means that the deal is done! Then there is no point in not commenting.
There is so much copyrighted material on Twitch streamed by users, whether it games, music etc that it would throw youtube TM-auto filter into overdrive.
Has anyone else done that?
And in before every popular channel gets shut down for copyright infringement...
An acquisition would seem logical then.
I'm not saying I could build a streaming site in my closet this weekend, but it's not impossible for competitors to enter the space (or existing competitors to grow in the space) so long as Google/YT doesn't too anything too anti-competitive.