I think it's very important for Twitch to do this, and I think they need to do it more, to be honest. Let me tell you a story.
I am a big Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fan. I play a bit, but I vastly prefer to watch professional play. I got into the game a year ago or so, and that seemed to be a glorious time to spectate the game. Streams were virtually exclusively on Twitch, and every weekend it felt like there was a ($100k+ prize pool) tournament, and every week there were high quality pick-up/practice games between professional players being streamed.
Of course (who can blame them?), YouTube Gaming wanted a piece of this pie. They cut some exclusive deals with a couple online leagues and tournament organizer, bringing a sizable chunk of the content with them to YouTube Gaming.
However, the users DID NOT follow (and UX over on YT can be almost entirely blamed), and the ensuing fracturing of the community has seen CS:GO drop from consistently top 5 in Twitch games to regularly outside the top 10. The thing is, though, the missing viewership mostly didn't migrate to YouTube, instead just deciding to not watch at all. The appeal behind Twitch and CS:GO was that there was basically non-stop _very high_ quality content being streamed, and you didn't need to put in a single ounce of effort to find it. YouTube very much does not have that same user flow down, at all.
And now (even though the position isn't particularly degraded), owing to the relative difficulty of finding tournaments on YouTube OR Twitch, I find myself watching a lot less. So goes the general vibe of the community. Sure, woe is us, 2 whole sources? But consider this: YouTube's discoverability is horrible, its UI plagued with reruns emblazoned with a red "LIVE NOW" that screams for your attention at first and later leaves you unwilling to trust any visuals on the site; Twitch, on the other hand, with its inability to pause / rewind / stream a smooth 1080p60 (hell, even 720p60 stutters 10x as much as YouTube's) leaves you comparatively upset about video quality when you watch there.
So I guess my point is that Twitch clearly loses in the tech department to YouTube, but its benefits (more entertaining chat, better discoverability and UI/UX) are more than enough to make you a dedicated user when exclusivity is part of that package. It'll be interesting to see which side can overcome its issues to gain the advantage.
Note: edits for readability have occurred over the 5 minutes following the posting of this comment
We care a lot about stream quality at Twitch. Can I ask where you're watching from that you get so many stutters? That's a key metric we measure ("buffer empties per hour"), so I know for a fact it's not high everywhere.
Google UX design in general, across all their products, is user hostile garbage. Obsessed with minimalism, taking away options and features, shoehorning everything into cross-product bland design themes, cross promoting products, preferring algorithms over humans, basically designed with Google's interests above the user's everytime.
I've found that third party applications like Orion are far better UI wise than Twitch. The twitch web interface always felt clunky to me. I don't know how they managed to mess up the interface but Orion (a desktop app) plays the video streams far better with no weird lags or stutters.
One huge advantage YouTube has over Twitch is that it ties your existing YT channel to the streaming UI. So for instance, when a huge YT personality like pewdiepie streams, his subscribers will be notified directly and don't need to go to another website to watch and participate in the chat. Also, AFAIK, YouTube has a donation and subscriber system in place so YouTubers can earn more while they stream.
Are you sure that CS:GO isn't just a less popular game than it used to be? At least on the esports scene?
Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream, I find it hard to believe that people suddenly can't find tournament streams when there's already extremely limited options to do so.
I enjoy twitch, even support a few streamers. Note, if you have Amazon Prime and a twitch account you can support a steamer for free.
Twitch did make a good move and similar to you I like watching better players at some of the games I have enjoyed. Yet for me the best feature of Twitch is to let me see some games I have yet to purchase to see if I would enjoy them.
The is pretty much my opinion as well. Fortunately I use HLTV.org to find out where the games are streamed but yeah, this is the main problem with YouTube as it is right now.
It also misses the Clip feature where you can export a part of the stream as a video to share with others.
The player is great though, you can fast forward, rewind 30 seconds, it performs amazing even on low performance machine/connections.
Agreed, it's interesting that competitive differentiation can succeed based on having the lowest UX friction. Google knows how to optimize performance, but design can trump performance in certain areas. Certainly, Amazon knows how to make a performant site, but it's their adherence to customer experience that gives Twitch the edge here. My money is on Twitch.
I mean this seriously; not as a dig. Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube? I may even watch a video if i see it when browsing.
But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun? How can you build a hugely expensive business off this? Is it all basically advertising for video games funded by companies?
This sucks for the consumer. During DotA's The International I can choose between many services (in-game, Steam, Youtube, Twitch) and pick the one which works better for me.
In the past 12 months Blizzard has integrated Facebook login [1], Facebook Live streaming [2], and Facebook friend lists [3] into their revamped Blizzard App (previously known as the Battle.net Launcher). The live streaming functionality was particularly a shot across the bow [4][5] against someone like Twitch/Curse, so it's interesting to see that Amazon has now responded and forged this new deal with Blizzard. I'm curious if it's just about the content (driving viewers to the platform) or if there's more in the works between these two.
Twitch has some very serious moderation challenges ahead of them, that they haven't proven they're able to solve, before I can be convinced this is a good thing. Online communities rely on good moderators and moderation tools to be able to thrive.
I am a big Hearthstone fan so I enjoy watching the competitions sometimes. It's been consistently the highest viewed Blizzard game on Twitch for a long time now so it's important to bring up in this discussion.
PlayHearthstone[1] is the official channel for Hearthstone events so you would think it would be representative of how Blizzard wants to operate in the competitive space. Whether it is due to technology, lack of oversight, or simply not caring, Twitch chat is notoriously atrocious; rampant with trolling, vitriol, spamming, and terrible behavior.
To make things worse, there's absolutely no consistency with how events are moderated, if they are at all.
For one event, members are banned for simply asking questions, or providing constructive criticism to the casting of the event with mods creating trigger phrases or words that lead to users getting banned immediately without knowing why. For other events, the chatters are allowed to use all manner of racial, sexual, demeaning, and outright threatening and horrific text towards the casters, the events, and the participants.
It's disgusting to watch, completely unprofessional, and something that has been brought up multiple times by the community with no concrete resolution.
Either Blizzard finds it acceptable, Twitch finds it acceptable, or they haven't figured out how to do well in moderating live chats with thousands of people.
Given their track record, I'm hesitant to be excited about the exclusivity.
Interesting this is now news, where a few years ago it would have been almost obvious that these events would be on Twitch, where else could they be? (not quite, there were competitors, but more specialized)
Wonder if Twitch somehow got a hold on major Brood War events, namely the Afreeca Starleague, seeing as how it was already getting restreamed in English on Twitch. With the HD remaster I imagine Blizzard would want to take back more control and hold more events of their own, too.
On that note, I still don't know what version/patch the competitive community wants to use going forward, either.
Twitch is nice, but my biggest grief is that it's not YouTube. YouTube is literally everywhere, on every TV, set-top-box, cast device, etc. Twitch is not. Which make it more complicated to watch streams and vods/replays.
It's the same issue Netflix competitors have. They need to get everywhere fast.
That's a shame, I like Mixer so much more than Twitch. Twitch at this point feels like MySpace, with all the custom bullshit sprinkled around. Mixer is nicer and clean, and f-a-s-t. I'm waiting for the Mixer apple tv app and I'll be all set.
As noted in the article, Twitch is owned by Amazon now, so they have a lot of money and other leverage to play with. It's not a knock against Twitch, but it's also not as much of a coup as the headline and article suggest.
Exclusive streaming deals are bad. E3 proved that Twitch has trouble with high viewer counts. YouTube had higher viewer counts on just about all major conferences at E3 and had no network problems.
I'm just tired of bundling deals together. I saw an ad online today saying if you're a Twitch Premium user you will get a gold loot box in Overwatch. I just want to enjoy Overwatch, and it feels like those loot boxes almost never deal out good loot anymore. I do not look forward to earning loot boxes.
Twitch has destroyed the way I consume twitch. I used to stick twitch on my TV while eating dinner or for big events such as csgo majors or LCS finals.
But as of about a month ago twitch now blocks chromecast.
I can no longer watch twitch on my TV and I hate that fact. And no I'm not going to buy a 'fire stick', I don't like being manipulated into buying something when it previously worked well and has been deliberately downgraded.
Hey eterm, this is not the case, we are not blocking chromecast on purpose. Can you send me an email at [email protected] and I'll happily gather the error data to ease troubleshooting.
I'm pretty sure this is an isolated instance as I've just watched twitch on Chromecast last week. Jumping out and blaming Tiwtch based on one instance and forming a conspiracy theory about amazon promoting fire stick is as unhelpful as it can get. Why is this so high in the comments?
I've watched Twitch via my Chromecast as recently as a few days ago, so it's certainly not true in general that Twitch blocks Chromecast. A few reddit threads suggest that some streams might use an encoding that Chromecast doesn't support, though.
I have a fire stick (gifted to me) and the twitch app on it is awful. Bad enough that even I noticed. As far as I can tell there is no way to filter the videos by language/region like I can on the desktop.
The videos are displayed in 'current viewers' descending order and I have to scroll for a while and hope that the stream title has enough info to guess at the language (I don't have favorite streamers, I will watch whoever).
I haven't found a way around this in the months I have had it and half the time I use the youtube app and watch a pre-recorded game instead.
WTF Amazon ? I also did that, but only in summer (for architectural reasons). I'm already pissed I won't be able to do that this summer. Thank you for the heads up.
I only run into this issue when I try to watch replays (previously streamed content). Which sucks... frankly. I hate navigating through content on YouTube.
Wait, 320 Million viewers? That has to be a historical aggregate of sorts. What kind of source for that claim exists? Oh, let's check the link!
Hmm, okay, it goes to an article that cites another source. The BBC? Reputable source, so here's the deal:
>Esports generated $493m (£400m) in revenue in 2016, with a global audience of about 320 million people.
So yeah, that's an aggregate of all of 2016. Let's compare it to the highest watched Super Bowl on record - Broncos vs. Seahawks: 111 million US viewers. In ONE DAY.
Yes I understand that I'm skewing pretty hard, but even the worst Super Bowl viewing in modern times pulled 39 million or so.
My point is that yeah, eSports looks like it has some numbers, but I work in a high rise building full of financially successful people that are desired marketing targets and I have little doubt barely 0.01% of them watch eSports.
Or, if I want to be a real jackass about it, I could just call eSports the equivalent of K-Pop. The numbers are there to show it's popular, sure. It's just not the target market for millions of dollars of advertising budget for US eyes.
The demographic that Twitch is after isn't just a niche curiosity. That is the same demographic that spent an estimated 1.6 billion dollars in 2016 on League of Legends, one of the many successful games that are featured on Twitch. Another estimated 18 million dollars a month in Dota 2. One of the most successful streamers on Twitch reportedly pulls in 2 million dollars a year.
It's not on the level of the NFL's 13+ billion dollars a year, but it's certainly nothing to laugh at. Keep in mind that Amazon purchased Twitch for almost 1 billion dollars.
Desired marketing targets is exactly what Twitch and eSports target. 18-54 year old males. Your high rise might have a few thousand people in it, there are bound to be many that play video games and maybe watch streamers.
There is a stigma in some circles that video games are for kids and adults maybe won't admit in a work environment that they play/watch because it may sound unprofessional?
It's a new(ish) platform whose demographic (people who enjoy video games) is growing larger every year. Today's 40 and 50 year olds don't play nearly as many games as the next decade's will. Whether or not they can wrangle that into marketing $$$ is another story.
[+] [-] nawgszy|8 years ago|reply
I am a big Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fan. I play a bit, but I vastly prefer to watch professional play. I got into the game a year ago or so, and that seemed to be a glorious time to spectate the game. Streams were virtually exclusively on Twitch, and every weekend it felt like there was a ($100k+ prize pool) tournament, and every week there were high quality pick-up/practice games between professional players being streamed.
Of course (who can blame them?), YouTube Gaming wanted a piece of this pie. They cut some exclusive deals with a couple online leagues and tournament organizer, bringing a sizable chunk of the content with them to YouTube Gaming.
However, the users DID NOT follow (and UX over on YT can be almost entirely blamed), and the ensuing fracturing of the community has seen CS:GO drop from consistently top 5 in Twitch games to regularly outside the top 10. The thing is, though, the missing viewership mostly didn't migrate to YouTube, instead just deciding to not watch at all. The appeal behind Twitch and CS:GO was that there was basically non-stop _very high_ quality content being streamed, and you didn't need to put in a single ounce of effort to find it. YouTube very much does not have that same user flow down, at all.
And now (even though the position isn't particularly degraded), owing to the relative difficulty of finding tournaments on YouTube OR Twitch, I find myself watching a lot less. So goes the general vibe of the community. Sure, woe is us, 2 whole sources? But consider this: YouTube's discoverability is horrible, its UI plagued with reruns emblazoned with a red "LIVE NOW" that screams for your attention at first and later leaves you unwilling to trust any visuals on the site; Twitch, on the other hand, with its inability to pause / rewind / stream a smooth 1080p60 (hell, even 720p60 stutters 10x as much as YouTube's) leaves you comparatively upset about video quality when you watch there.
So I guess my point is that Twitch clearly loses in the tech department to YouTube, but its benefits (more entertaining chat, better discoverability and UI/UX) are more than enough to make you a dedicated user when exclusivity is part of that package. It'll be interesting to see which side can overcome its issues to gain the advantage.
Note: edits for readability have occurred over the 5 minutes following the posting of this comment
[+] [-] emmett|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ferofluid|8 years ago|reply
You can get the source here: https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion
or just google "Orion Twitch" if you want compiled binaries.
I have no affiliation with Orion, just a satisfied user.
[+] [-] Cyph0n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debaserab2|8 years ago|reply
Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream, I find it hard to believe that people suddenly can't find tournament streams when there's already extremely limited options to do so.
[+] [-] arkitaip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|8 years ago|reply
Twitch did make a good move and similar to you I like watching better players at some of the games I have enjoyed. Yet for me the best feature of Twitch is to let me see some games I have yet to purchase to see if I would enjoy them.
[+] [-] daddykotex|8 years ago|reply
The is pretty much my opinion as well. Fortunately I use HLTV.org to find out where the games are streamed but yeah, this is the main problem with YouTube as it is right now.
It also misses the Clip feature where you can export a part of the stream as a video to share with others.
The player is great though, you can fast forward, rewind 30 seconds, it performs amazing even on low performance machine/connections.
[+] [-] dmartinez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellbanner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway91111|8 years ago|reply
I mean this seriously; not as a dig. Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube? I may even watch a video if i see it when browsing.
But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun? How can you build a hugely expensive business off this? Is it all basically advertising for video games funded by companies?
[+] [-] xfalcox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niftich|8 years ago|reply
Warning, slow links: [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/06/facebook-to-provide-login... [2] http://www.wowhead.com/news=255393/blizzard-and-facebook-str... [3] http://www.wowhead.com/news=260084/battle-net-and-facebook-f... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371440 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381447
[+] [-] LandoCalrissian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bballer|8 years ago|reply
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-radio-episode-2-...
[+] [-] randomdrake|8 years ago|reply
I am a big Hearthstone fan so I enjoy watching the competitions sometimes. It's been consistently the highest viewed Blizzard game on Twitch for a long time now so it's important to bring up in this discussion.
PlayHearthstone[1] is the official channel for Hearthstone events so you would think it would be representative of how Blizzard wants to operate in the competitive space. Whether it is due to technology, lack of oversight, or simply not caring, Twitch chat is notoriously atrocious; rampant with trolling, vitriol, spamming, and terrible behavior.
To make things worse, there's absolutely no consistency with how events are moderated, if they are at all.
For one event, members are banned for simply asking questions, or providing constructive criticism to the casting of the event with mods creating trigger phrases or words that lead to users getting banned immediately without knowing why. For other events, the chatters are allowed to use all manner of racial, sexual, demeaning, and outright threatening and horrific text towards the casters, the events, and the participants.
It's disgusting to watch, completely unprofessional, and something that has been brought up multiple times by the community with no concrete resolution.
Either Blizzard finds it acceptable, Twitch finds it acceptable, or they haven't figured out how to do well in moderating live chats with thousands of people.
Given their track record, I'm hesitant to be excited about the exclusivity.
[1] - https://www.twitch.tv/playhearthstone
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicytunacone|8 years ago|reply
On that note, I still don't know what version/patch the competitive community wants to use going forward, either.
[+] [-] Aissen|8 years ago|reply
It's the same issue Netflix competitors have. They need to get everywhere fast.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james4k|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArlenBales|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitmap|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eterm|8 years ago|reply
But as of about a month ago twitch now blocks chromecast.
I can no longer watch twitch on my TV and I hate that fact. And no I'm not going to buy a 'fire stick', I don't like being manipulated into buying something when it previously worked well and has been deliberately downgraded.
[+] [-] slashink|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yzmtf2008|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antientropic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hfsktr|8 years ago|reply
I haven't found a way around this in the months I have had it and half the time I use the youtube app and watch a pre-recorded game instead.
[+] [-] Aissen|8 years ago|reply
BTW, did you try any technical workaround?
[+] [-] ErikHuisman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrimbault|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trevman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|8 years ago|reply
Hmm, okay, it goes to an article that cites another source. The BBC? Reputable source, so here's the deal:
>Esports generated $493m (£400m) in revenue in 2016, with a global audience of about 320 million people.
So yeah, that's an aggregate of all of 2016. Let's compare it to the highest watched Super Bowl on record - Broncos vs. Seahawks: 111 million US viewers. In ONE DAY.
Yes I understand that I'm skewing pretty hard, but even the worst Super Bowl viewing in modern times pulled 39 million or so.
My point is that yeah, eSports looks like it has some numbers, but I work in a high rise building full of financially successful people that are desired marketing targets and I have little doubt barely 0.01% of them watch eSports.
Or, if I want to be a real jackass about it, I could just call eSports the equivalent of K-Pop. The numbers are there to show it's popular, sure. It's just not the target market for millions of dollars of advertising budget for US eyes.
[+] [-] djloche|8 years ago|reply
2016 Basketball Worlds Final Game: 31M viewers 2016 Baseball Worlds Final Game: 40M viewers 2016 League of Legends Worlds Final: 43M viewers
So, okay. eSports isn't quite at the American Football level. But, it right in line with the other top broadcast sports
[+] [-] lovehashbrowns|8 years ago|reply
It's not on the level of the NFL's 13+ billion dollars a year, but it's certainly nothing to laugh at. Keep in mind that Amazon purchased Twitch for almost 1 billion dollars.
[+] [-] matt_s|8 years ago|reply
There is a stigma in some circles that video games are for kids and adults maybe won't admit in a work environment that they play/watch because it may sound unprofessional?
[+] [-] fnovd|8 years ago|reply
It's a new(ish) platform whose demographic (people who enjoy video games) is growing larger every year. Today's 40 and 50 year olds don't play nearly as many games as the next decade's will. Whether or not they can wrangle that into marketing $$$ is another story.