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.
YouTube isn't a contender, but they could very well be if they wanted it. They're most poised. YouTube just needs to implement some of the gamer-specific features that Twitch has. Namely subscription revenue and broadcaster customization.
Most Twitch broadcasters are already using YouTube heavily as part of their income, just not for streaming. They upload highlights or other videos on their YouTube partnered channel.
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.
And what streamer is going to trust them? I think there are MANY top streamers that were owed thousands of dollars. Twitch.tv was a DISTANT 2nd place to Own3D but then streamers were paid to move to Twitch (Dignatas LOL) and than once the checks strarted not coming it was a fast transition to twitch.
there are a lot of companies doing this in Asia. Lots of them are printing money. Majority of them are involved in production in one way or another though.
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/
I've been a gamer all my life and this game keeps hooking me -- I've been playing consistently for 3 years now.
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.
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.
> 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.
> "privilege" (which is a meaningless concept that just means "you're bad")
The rest of your comment was pretty reasonable [1], but here you just went off the rails.
"Privilege" does not simply mean "you're bad". It's a specific sub-category of "different perspective" that is really important and useful in understanding many of the subtler aspects of social power imbalance.
So here's the question: do you care whether/that some broad groups of people are systematically harmed for reasons that are absolutely not their fault? If you don't care, well, I'm sad to hear that, but I think you can safely move forward without caring what "privilege" actually means. If you do care, you can't effectively think about this problem without knowing about privilege, and how it affects your thinking. For one thing, privilege is part of the problem directly. But even more important, privilege causes a type of cognitive bias that makes it harder to see the problem clearly. It's like not knowing about fundamental attribution error, or not knowing about confirmation bias.
[1] Although I personally respectfully disagree with much of your comment, I think it was mostly reasonable. And while I think jamesaguilar is more right than wrong, I think he made his case pretty poorly. And in particular, I agree with you that "If [you don't agree with me], ... you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy" was, as you say, inappropriately aggressive and accusatory.
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.
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.
If it's not sexist, it sure is still apropos of nothing given the context. Whenever I watch Twitch, I'm rarely looking at somebody's face on the stream (because there isn't one). If there is, it's surely not a face made to "look cute". It's usually a guy with his mouth hanging open because he's concentrating on a game. Using "cleavage" intimates that it's only women (or typifies women as some "other") that try to use their looks on Twitch to get far because they don't have any personality or ability. OP could have just said "good looks" to get the point across.
I went on Twitch for the first time ever tonight as I was reading the linked article, clicked on World of Warcraft at random, and 6 of the 11 featured streams visible above the fold included a picture-in-picture of a cute girl with lots of cleavage. I clicked one out of interest and she wasn't even playing a game...she had the twitch chat up on her screen and was soliciting donations while people spammed the chat with "I wanna cum on your tits" like I was on some awful video game camgirl site. Anyway, clearly you're not watching WoW videos, but statement above was not 'apropos of nothing'.
>"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.
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!
Man, I'm ready. I'm pretty tired of ads that randomly ignore mute, have "skip" buttons that don't work, or otherwise just don't function correctly. Also, I always feel like I'm cheating when I watch from my tablet or 360, which don't get ads.
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.
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
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.
They definitely have major issues due to the sheer amount of bandwidth they need to utilize. I find their popular stream (or perhaps it's all streams during popular events) watchable (at any resolution, and it's definitely not my Internet connection) around half of the time.
I have seen Twitch representatives essentially blame this on the ISPs/backbones. They say they try to make deals to secure bandwidth across backbones, but they're often just at the mercy of the big guys. The most well-known issue was with Time Warner, which was apparently solved later according to a Twitch blog post.
This isn't necessarily twitch's fault. I know there were issues with AT&T in my area related to twitch and AT&T refused to help alleviate the issue until they got a ton of complaints. It seems similar to the struggles netflix sees with some ISPs
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.
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.
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.
Are you using a percentage growth as your measurement or an absolute value because I can guarantee you that if you are using a percentage value this is not true.
it's still unclear where the audience will capp off as far as esports goes.
soccer has been around for most living people's entire lives, whereas esports only spans 1-2 generations at most.
The growth in soccer audience could be largely attributed to tech making it more accessible, whereas with esports people are completely new to the notion of competitive video games.
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.
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.
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.
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.