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Comment by ken47 | Hacker News Reader

Twitch has already won over most of the potential audience for computer game streaming. Computer gamers tend to be a loyal bunch, and they know that Twitch is a site by and for gamers. If I had to guess, YouTube Gaming will have trouble making headway.

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The problem is Twitch infrastrucutre is not good enough to stream properly in many countries. A 1080p/60fps stream has only about a 6Mbit bitrate but in Australia will not work, even on a connection ten times as fast. Plus, without a special agreeement that only top streamers have, Twitch takes 50% of subscription money - I'm sure Google can afford smaller margins to lure streamers over.

The problem they will face is not that gamers are loyal so much as for many people "live video game broadcast" is Twitch, so people are unlikely to notice live streams if they're elsewhere. This is solvable though - most streamers upload their VODs to YouTube anyway so they can easily notify users when a streamer is live.

1) I'm sure with Amazon's resources behind them, Twitch will get their infrastructure up to snuff in more remote regions of the world.

2) Amazon could surely afford to compete with Google on sub share % if need be. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of offering a higher sub share. It's (sub share) * (# of subs). Twitch has a very good head start on the latter.

As someone lives in Asia currently , I can approve this completely , I am watching videos from YouTube without any lag or any other problem , but believe me , watching videos from twitch is completely nightmare (at least for me)

You are confusing megabits and megabytes. You likely read that it requires minimum 6 megabytes per second to stream 1080p/60fps. That would be 42 megabits. And that is a minimum. Depending on your settings you could need much more then that. Not to mention Australia has notoriously bad internet in general.

I have 150/50 fiber internet in brazil -- 50% of the time, i cannot watch a 1080p twitch stream, while i can watch a youtube livestream.

twitch infrastructure is notoriously bad for anyone that is not american.

Often twitch gets terrible for me until I load a VPN, and I'm in America. They're probably getting screwed on peering.

No, it's six megabit. You can right click on a stream and choose "playback stats" and it will give you a live bitrate as well as some other details. On my connection I can comfortably stream 4K YouTube or Netflix, but Twitch shits itself at anything more than 720p.

It's like butchers and supermarkets... The butchers, they can't compete. It seems doomed to be centralized. They're not creating another service as much as they're organizing their supermarket.

I'd guess Google should buy Twitch then but I'm just a coder not a business person.

It's almost sure that they tried, but the deal didn't go through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv#Acquisition_by_Amazo...

I see, we just noticed the story on Roku Technology News this morning too, didn't realize Google did try to buy them. In that case, it makes complete sense, thanks.

At least in terms of the esports streaming component people will go to wherever the big events are happening.

Fro a Dota perspective competition like MLG, Hitbox, DailyMotion and Azubu have gone down the path of getting exclusive events and a lot of the audience generally follows.

There is also the massive Chinese market which is generally siloed from the rest of the world.

One thing other sites struggle with is getting the same Chat experience that a lot of people like from Twitch for big events.

People aren't going to stop watching their favorite personalities just because they switch to YouTube. The only thing YouTube has to do is convince some big names that they can make more money on their site. And that should be easy to do, if it is in fact true. A couple of small streamers are surely going to try it, and if they report good results, more and more people will switch.

Twitch's priorities aren't exactly spectacular, considering how they switched streaming backends in a way that moved them from 5-8 second latency to 30ish second latency (or more, sometimes stretching to minutes). They've improved it over time but that transition was pretty awful for any channel that interacts directly with chat.

I think one way Twitch could lose me is if YouTube figures out discovery. I cut the cord and as odd as this sounds I will plop down on the couch with dinner and check out what's on Twitch. The UIs I see are focused on popular games as opposed to what might be most interesting (to me) going on right now.

Twitch is "good enough" but if YouTube Gaming essentially can provide better streams, people will switch.

Twitch recently banned adult content. Meaning games with nudity and violence (like Hatred) are not allowed.

Not sure Gamers like that whole censorship thing. Ask yourself why GTA is the best selling game on Steam, while constantly being shit on by both the Social Justice Left and the Christian Right.

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