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Speed and Spectators Lead to Twitch, a Gaming Nexus

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, August 26, 2014

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Technology |Speed and Spectators Lead to a Gaming Nexus



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To call Twitch.tv a happy accident would be a grand understatement.


The website has quickly emerged as the go-to destination for watching video games, drawing tens of millions of viewers each month. On Monday, that success led to a huge payday for the company’s founders, as Amazon said it had reached a deal to buy Twitch for more than $1 billion.


But Twitch was never supposed to exist.


The site grew from a small side project started by a handful of start-up engineers into a company that — as one of the founders described in an interview last week — happened to land at the right place at the right time.


“It became the tail that wagged the dog,” Emmett Shear, one of Twitch’s founders, said in the interview. “It ended up taking over our whole company.”


In 2006, Mr. Shear and Justin Kan had a question: What would happen if they wore cameras 24 hours a day and broadcast their lives to the web?



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That curiosity led them to create Justin.tv, and Mr. Kan became the star, “lifecasting” his daily activities for anyone to see. Regular users were invited to do the same.


But Mr. Kan and Mr. Shear quickly noticed that most of Justin.tv’s success came from video game players who used the site to stream themselves playing. In 2011, the group decided to create a separate company, introducing Twitch — a new, entirely gaming-focused version of the site — at the E3 gaming exposition in California.


“It became clear that it was its own beast,” Mr. Shear said.


The company did not respond to interview requests on Tuesday about the company’s plans now that it will be owned by Amazon. But one thing is clear: Twitch is a huge business, a hot spot for people to watch and chat about what has essentially become online gaming as spectator sport, one played not with shoulder pads and helmets, but with ergonomic keyboards and screen-mounted webcams.


The site has many similarities to YouTube, the reigning king of online video. As on YouTube, people host their own individual video channels. Anyone can start a channel, and most anyone can watch others’ channels.


But unlike YouTube, Twitch’s focus is on games and especially on live-streaming video, not recorded video. People with a channel on Twitch host live video sessions of the games they are playing — be it short, first-person shoot-’em-up battles or lengthy group quests in role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Broadcasters often converse with their followers in a dedicated chat room. Popular streamers can amass thousands of followers; the most popular streamers have fans that number in the millions.


In part, Mr. Shear said, Twitch’s surge in popularity is the result of technological changes beyond the company’s control. Live-streamed video is only as good as the Internet network it runs on. And until recent years, the broadband backbone in the United States struggled to handle the heavy traffic that live streaming demands.


“This couldn’t have existed five years before we launched it,” Mr. Shear said. “You needed high-resolution video. You needed broadband Internet, which just wasn’t there.”


South Korea, by comparison, has had more robust Internet networks than the United States for years. When the service was becoming popular with gamers, United States broadband speeds were a fraction of those in South Korea, according to a 2010 report from Akamai, an Internet content delivery network. High-speed access was also more expensive in the United States than in South Korea and other countries, according to Akamai.


It is perhaps no surprise, then, that South Korea has been the leader in live-streamed gaming, hosting major “e-sports” tournaments in which gamers compete against one another in front of millions of online viewers for big prizes — essentially Seoul’s version of Monday Night Football.


But now in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Shear said, “Internet access is just getting cheaper and cheaper, faster and faster.”


The speed has helped the site generate 55 million regular visitors from around the world each month, and those people watch 16 billion minutes of its videos. More than 1.1 million people broadcast their gaming activity to the service. (In the meantime, Justin.tv operations were wound down completely this month.)


Along with the advancement of technology, Twitch largely credits its success to its robust network of engaged members. In essence, the company has turned into a cluster of ad hoc social networks, a place to chat about anything from the game on the screen to what people had for breakfast that morning.


“Every channel is its own microcommunity, where everyone gets to know each other over their shared interests,” Mr. Shear said.


Tessa Brook, a 30-year-old woman who goes by the name Tessachka on Twitch, posts her regular online gaming schedule — about 42 hours a week — so her 5,000 followers know when they can watch her play.


“I think Twitch was born out of a simple need to share game experiences,” said Brian Blau, a technology analyst at Gartner Research. Twitch is not a traditional social media company, like Facebook, he said, but the site’s social aspect is at its core. “Twitch connects gamers together with social-like features, and that creates a community.”


For Ms. Brook and popular streamers like her, gaming can also be lucrative. Popular players who are selected for Twitch’s “partner” program earn a cut of the revenue from advertisements that run on their channel. Streamers can also accept monetary donations of a dollar or more from viewers.


Mr. Shear said the next generation of Twitch gamers could be players of more casual games, like those popular on smartphones. Clash of Clans, for example, one of the most popular smartphone games, is becoming particularly popular to stream, he said.


But Mr. Shear said that the company was focused on more than smartphones. He said the company would also most likely pursue international expansion, especially in fast-growing regions like South America.


“Mobile is going up, adoption of every new generation of gaming console is going up, and there’s more money being spent on PC gaming than ever before,” Mr. Shear said. “Gaming, as a whole, is growing.”



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