Twitch was an accident. The live video-streaming service, which boasts over 55 million unique users each month, began life in 2007 as “Justin.tv”: an all-hours video livestream of co-founder Justin Kan’s life. That wasn’t the whole point of the service, of course; later that year, Justin.tv opened up to the public, who could then “livestream” to various “channels.” At its inception, Justin.tv was a form of internet television, offering live broadcasts across a variety of topics. One such topic — gaming — took a particularly large portion of Justin.tv’s audience. So much so that, in 2011, the company spun out gaming into its own website: Twitch.tv. Three years later and Justin.tv is dead, the company is now known as “Twitch Interactive” and Amazon just bought it for $970 million. Not too shabby for an “accident.”
WHAT IS TWITCH?
Like Justin.tv, Twitch.tv is a live video-broadcasting service. Unlike Justin.tv, Twitch focuses solely on gaming. More specifically, Twitch focuses primarily on e-sports: the burgeoning world of competitive games played professionally for money.
For example: Twitch hosts a non-stop livestream of “The International,” an annual game tournament. At The International, teams compete in a Valve game named DOTA 2. Twitch broadcasts those games in real time. This year, over 20 million people tuned in. Over 2 million people tuned in simultaneously at one point. Oh, and the winning team took home just over $5 million.
So, what are those 20 million people watching? They are literally watching live video of a video game being played by other human beings. The live video often has commentary (sometimes by the players themselves, other times by different folks), and frequently has a picture-in-picture view of the player’s face. That description can be applied to much of the content on Twitch, albeit with varying levels of production. The International (seen below) is a massive event, so its stream has very high production values.
In short, Twitch is mainly a venue for e-sports fans to watch live e-sports. But there’s another side to Twitch: participation. Within each Twitch user’s channel is an embedded chat widget, enabling the person (or people) broadcasting live video to interact directly with viewers. Interactivity expands the use of Twitch beyond simply watching e-sports being played live.
For example: Game-development studio Vlambeer uses its Twitch channel to broadcast a weekly stream of game development. Since its game is already available to purchase, fans can offer feedback directly on what they’ve played, see what’s currently in development and even influence the final product. It’s a direct pipeline from development team to player.
But these two examples are exceptions to the rule. They represent the “premium” end of Twitch’s content — the “whales” (the ones with especially high viewer numbers). Anyone can broadcast games on Twitch — even Engadget! — and, beyond using the web interface on a computer, it’s built into both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. There’s even a new Android tablet with Twitch broadcasting capability built in. That accessibility means that the vast majority of video content broadcast on Twitch is, well, “just some person playing a game.” Some channels attract millions of viewers. Some attract single digits.
WHO’S USING TWITCH? AND WHY?
Twitch’s full user base is enormous: over 55 million “unique viewers” use Twitch annually, and over 1 million people use Twitch to broadcast each month.
The heavy hitters — that is, the channels with the most views — tend to be “partners.” Twitch describes its “partner” program as such: “an exclusive group of the world’s most popular video game broadcasters, personalities, leagues, teams and tournaments.” That includes everything from The International to live broadcasts of press conferences; at this year’s big gaming trade show, E3, Twitch carried live broadcasts of every console maker’s press conference.
That said, the people broadcasting on Twitch vary dramatically. Though e-sports dominates the most-viewed list, Twitch is home to some incredible — and incredibly bizarre — user-generated content. Take, for instance, “Twitch Plays Pokémon.” Using Twitch, a programmer in Australia created an interactive game for Twitch viewers. He combined an emulation of Game Boy classic Pokémon Red with a bot that took text from chat. If a viewer entered “up” in chat, the character in Pokémon Red would move up. Simple enough! It becomes far less simple when hundreds of thousands of people are entering commands all at once. The result is what you see below.
Unbelievably, the game was eventually completed solely based on community commands. The system actually defeated a whole mess of Pokémon games. And now, fish are getting in on the action. Really!
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