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Comment by batiudrami | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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