
Twitch rides video game streaming wave to global success - aelaguiz
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/10/04/twitch-video-game-streaming/?source=yahoo_quote
======
brymaster
Twitch desperately needs a competitor as they're running in a space virtually
unchecked. Youtube doesn't count because they're not putting their full weight
against video game live streaming and the article was simply throwing Azubu a
bone by mentioning them.

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.

~~~
echohack
Experienced Twitch streamer here. I've been streaming for almost 2 years now
to Twitch.

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.

~~~
brymaster
Own3D.tv was a competitor in the sense that they provided the same service
Twitch does.

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.

------
bprater
The 'superbowl' of the game mentioned in the article -- League of Legends is
happening tonight at 8pm PST. Watch the event here:
[http://na.lolesports.com/](http://na.lolesports.com/)

I've been a gamer all my life and this game keeps hooking me -- I've been
playing consistently for 3 years now.

~~~
spoiledtechie
How to watch? Can't find the link on the site? Does it open up minutes before
the match?

~~~
sniW
I believe they'll be streaming it from here:
[http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames](http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames)

Starts at 8pm PDT.

------
Shivetya
I find Twitch useful for saving money, so many games out there and watching
how they actually play lets me put my money to games that actually fit my play
style.

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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Gotta love the sexist-comment-apropos-of-nothing you managed to throw in at
the end there.

~~~
baddox
Yes, claiming that personality and ability is more important than cleavage and
a cute face is definitely sexist.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Sigh. I should know better than to call these things out on HN.

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.

~~~
baddox
> 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?

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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
> have essentially no information about either

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.

~~~
baddox
I didn't deny that privilege exists, I said that in the context of this
accusation it is meaningless. And I was not unable to recognize a sexist
comment as sexist, because it was not a sexist comment. You have no "entropy,"
you just have two misconceptions.

------
kanamekun
Congrats Emmett! Was really inspired to read about how you guys built up
Twitch: [http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-
interview/](http://mixergy.com/emmett-shear-twitchtv-interview/)

Totally agree with others that you're building up the next ESPN.

~~~
weixiyen
Why is ESPN showing Nascar instead of starting up a gaming channel?

~~~
nols
Money, Nascar's TV contracts over the next decade are worth nearly $5 billion.

------
KVFinn
>"The eSports audience is a particularly valuable one for brand advertisers
because they are hard to reach via traditional media channels," said DiPietro.
"They tend to be extremely tech savvy, they are often cord-cutters, and they
are hyper-engaged in the online video and chat experience -- all of which
makes them very valuable for advertisers."

And very likely to use ad-block. I wonder when Twitch finally starts baking
ads into the actual of the stream.

~~~
ubercore
There would be a lot of benefit to doing this, since one of the major
complaints about Twitch service is ads that don't follow the rules and ignore
volume controls. I don't believe they've solved this problem yet.

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!

------
colmvp
I like Twitch, but it's interesting to see comments from Redditors and
especially European users who have huge frustrations over the quality of
streams, bugginess, and chat which never seems to work right.

Source:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_fe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1nfcno/i_feel_bad_for_streamers/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1nfrlv/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_rai...](http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1nfrkf/twitch_raises_another_20_million_how_twitch_took/)

~~~
LispShmisp
Indeed there are some serious issues with Twitch in Europe. For about a year
streams were crystal clear with no issues. Then they started to mess with
stream qualities, I guess they had to do some interesting optimizations in
order to deal with increasing userbase. So since this summer I've only been
able to watch streams on highest quality a couple of times. Problem with
second highest quality is that whenever there's movement in-game, stream looks
pixelated, some games look especially bad: [ARMA: DayZ on Twitch High quality]
[http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr](http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr)

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.

------
percentcer
Planet Money just did a special on cable channel bundling, focusing on ESPN's
early days and rise to prominence, and it really made me think we're about to
witness that same path with twitch. It's perfectly positioned to be the ESPN
for the internet generation.

~~~
TillE
The audience and money involved with e-sports is a microscopic fraction of any
major professional sport. This is an interesting nerd culture thing, but if
you want a serious example of sports adapting to the internet generation, look
at what NBC is doing with the English Premier League.

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.

~~~
baldfat
Yeah a HUGE world wide sport that has been around for decades and has one of
the largest sporting events in the world has more viewers then my nerd watch
habit??? GO figure????

Millions upon millions of dollars are being made so sure eSports is a big
deal.

------
changdizzle
congrats kevin, emmett and team! what's awesome about this is that not only is
twitch revolutionizing how people consume video games, the people that make up
twitch are also so passionate about what they do. it'll be really interesting
to see how they ramp up monetization efforts as they've tried a variety of
things (ads instream, sponsored links on the sidebar by kabam, subscription
models for streams), but i'm confident they'll get it right.

------
kleiba
I really like twitch.tv and have spent hours watching it. But for reasons I
don't want to go into, I'm forced to use a very outdated browser. And yet they
managed to give me a really good UX over at twitch.tv.

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.

~~~
Miyamoto
What is your very old browser? That bit of information might, you know, help
Twitch web developers reading this.

~~~
kleiba
Well, yeah, I already contacted them directly when my browser stopped working
with the site and they pretty much said they can't support stone-old browsers.
Can't blame them.

------
erickhill
Strikes me that this could be an interesting acquisition target for Yahoo.
They have the infrastructure and cash to support its growth.

Twitch also has the added bonus of already being purple, too.

