Video will consume bandwidth like there is no tomorrow, and the bigger the percentage of updates on a frame-to-frame basis the larger the bandwidth required. With the resolutions involved that's actually not all that bad.

We came within a hair of being kicked off the net for consuming too much intercontinental bandwidth in the late 90's. The internet was simply not designed with video in mind so it's testimony to how well it has adapted that something like twitch can even exist.

That's slightly misleading because their traffic involves live HD video streams for rather long periods of time. For example, 1000 Twitch users will represent orders of magnitude more traffic than 1000 Facebook users. Another impressive point is since the content is live it's not as easy to CDN like Netflix/YouTube.

It's still a ton of bandwidth. I'm sure they'll be happy no longer having to pay that bill.

And half of that was probably twitch plays pokemon.

that is actually awful.

their ratio of infrastructure cost to revenue will never look good.