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It’s assinine that these companies keep investing in ideas that A/ Rely on video and B/ Rely on the majority of their content creators contributing their content for free.
The only thing that Twitch was ever going to do was drive traffic elsewhere. Hence why Amazon bought them. But they failed to get good at being Twitch. It still sucks in terms of performance and there’s no subsidiary platform for Twitch clips. Also didn’t they chase off most of their adult content creators?
So they’re basically trying to be profitable off of traditional advertising? Ha!
I hate to say it because I hate YouTube, too, but they’re getting pretty close to being as good at hosting streaming as Twitch is. The fact that full-length streams can just be saved straight to the user’s YouTube channel, with chat and everything else intact, is a pretty rad feature.
I find twitch to be a live-first platform.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if something on yt is live, if a channel is currently live etc.
And things like raids (sending your viewers to another channel) and clips (user selected segments of streams) which helps build community.
Twitch is a community, and a community of communities. I’ve never found that feeling on YouTube.
I do like how easy it is to rewind YT live streams, tho.
I hope twitch gets some decent competition (and not something that buys a few high profile streamers and expect the rest to work… because it’s the smaller communities that makes twitch more than shroud/xqc/whoever).
But I have no idea how someone would actually make it profitable, never mind build the level of smaller communities that twitch has.
Profitable? I thought it was a loss leader to get people into Amazon’s gaming ecosystem.
I’d care if it was profitable when it was on its own, but now that it’s part of Amazon, I assumed it was just part of a Prime sub.
Amazon bought Twitch for its video live streaming infrastructure/tech, which at the time was unmatched. Now Amazon offers that infra/tech via AWS and anyone can spin up a Twitch competitor just as capable.
Amazon doesn’t care about Twitch at all. Prime subs are just another benefit to make Amazon Prime more appealing to consumers, but iirc Twitch is the one who actually pays out of pocket for Prime subs.
Like I care. Amazon bought it, they have a monopoly, hey maybe these consumer facing startups would be more profitable if all the money wasnt already distributed so unevenly?
I would hesitate to take a CEO on his word, but if it is actually unprofitable, that’s no accident, it’s an attempt to corner the market, instead of building something sustainable. Tech companies everywhere keep doing this and it has to stop.
The answer is so simple and yet the daft ceo does not get it. Just stop blocking users from seeing all the game channels they favourited. At the moment, whatever game channel I favourite, disappears into my library and never appears on my listings of favourites. Twitch modifies everything you do without telling you. Well, STOP IT YOU DUMB FUCKS. So bloody annoying. If they fixed this, everyone would use twitch for games and twitch would bea5 every other website. Colossal stupidity.
This isn’t surprising in the least. They’ve been pushing more and more ads recently; trying to get streamers to run them more often. I hate ads, so I have always opted for a short pre-roll so that when its done, viewers won’t have to worry about ads anymore. But I think Twitch will eventually force streamers to run ads every half hour, no matter how many people they scare off.
People don’t realise how expensive video streaming is, especially at a larger service’s scale. There’s no just way to have a fully free service with no ads (or even just minimal ads).
It’s not even the servers or VOD storage. It’s the bandwidth.
Live streaming isn’t cheap. AWS have example pricing:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-on-aws/cost.html
Now, expect twitch to get a hefty discount. Even if they are paying 30% of that cost (and I’ve pulled that number out of my ass), that’s $500 per hour for a 10k viewer stream (and that’s assuming an average of 4mbps bitrate, not the source 8mbps).
A 10k (8mbps bitrate, so 80,000mbps or 80gbps total sending - egest? - bandwidth) viewer streamer is going to be on a 70/30 split.
So for a $5 sub, twitch is getting $1.50.
So that’s 330 subs per hour, or 5.5 subs per minute, or 1 sub every 11 seconds to cover the bandwidth costs.
AWS EC2 outbound bandwidth calculators align pretty closely with these costs, so it’s not like “video connections get the cheap networks” or anything.
It’s all of that plus the cost of the servers, electricity, employees, etc. I’m not sure if they use AWS, but they’d definitely be using a premium blend of upstream providers (no second-rate providers like Cogent, Psychz, M247, etc) to avoid latency and reduce buffering, which I’m sure is what AWS does for their video streaming service too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitch hit egress bandwidth usage in the order of terabits per second during peak times. Having that much bandwidth available is not cheap.
The tricky thing with streaming is that the data can’t be cached, since it’s streaming in real-time, so it’d cost way more than stored on-demand video like YouTube. Big companies like Netflix, Facebook, Google, etc give large ISPs some of their caching hardware (usually for free). It significantly reduces bandwidth costs for both the ISP and the service, as YouTube and Facebook are often over 50% of an ISPs bandwidth usage.
If you look at a popular YouTube video, or a popular video or image on Facebook, it’s likely coming from within your ISP’s network, which is practically free for them. The caching box only needs to download it once from the upstream servers. None of that is doable with a live stream.
It’s critical that Twitch is here not just today, not just tomorrow, but 50 years from now, 100 years from now. Our job is to run Twitch in a manner that can ensure its prosperity […]
I know the guy is peddling bullshit to justify the layoffs, but 50 years from now, really? Publicly traded companies / stakeholders rarely care about 5 years from now…
