I wonder how the founders feel.
Well we still got $970 million dollars, so mostly alright :)
LOL, this is gold :)
Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
161–170 of 175 posts
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#162Not real
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
26 page transcript...how long did this take?
One hour. Think of it as a mini-book. I shared the Google Doc so you can save it to your Gogle Drive and read it when you have time for something longer than a blog post.
I think the other commenter meant "how long to transcribe it?", if you did it manually.
(Thanks for the transcription!)
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#164With all that growth opportunity, you'd think they could invest a little more in the engineering side. I mean, I like Twitch, but their platform is still a mess. Chat delay can be a minute or more, and the VOD situation still sucks (60 days? Seriously?). I mean, they're owned by the people who run AWS for crying out loud. They should be able to knock this out of the park. I thought YouTube Gaming was going to muscle…
Fully acknowledging that some of the things they have issues with, my startup also has issues with, BUT: My startup is under 2 years old, in the same space, and with a much smaller team. We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces, and even released many other features that Twitch is only now also working on. We have regularly looked at this market and what keeps fueling twitch's success, and str…
> We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces
A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience.
My point is, you haven't solved Twitch's problems at Twitch's scale.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#165More and more people are dumping cable TV. The main reasons that I hear for people keeping it are sports and news. If live streaming sites like twitch can sign deals with sports leagues, then I think we will see even more people cancelling their cable. The nice thing about streaming is that you aren't channel limited, so there is no reason why you can't follow some obscure minor league team on the other side of the p…
NFL rights alone will (my guess) cost around 5 billion USD per year when the next contracts are negotiated, maybe more. There is no way an online service puts up that kind of money considering something like 1/3 of Americans simply don't have high-speed internet access.
The last time the rights were negotiated in 2013, they were $40B, with ESPN paying about double what NBC, CBS and Fox payed.
There is one company with the kind of money that might make sense -- Apple.
It would be a heck of a way for them to jumpstart a streaming service and make it only available on AppleTV.
Probably the biggest holdup would be the NFL itself, who makes sure those broadcast contracts reach the biggest number of people to keep their brand popular.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#166What is a good example of a twitch stream to show how great live streaming can be?
My favorite is https://www.twitch.tv/fopt_membrillo . He streams pro Age of Empires 2 tournaments in the crazy Spanish soccer style, and his community (including me) support him enough that it's his full-time job. Full-time AoE2 streamer in 2016??? I think that's amazing. An example of a crazy moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrxXKK8oIyE
Speaking of AoE2, I think Resonance22 has a really good voice and is great at explaining the game while playing/spectating. Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo-qAVGb5vQ
(He's not doing it full-time.)
AoE2 HD really got me back into PC gaming after a decade of only touching Wii/Wii U/mobile games. I'm not yet sure if it can drag me into watching Twitch, though.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fully acknowledging that some of the things they have issues with, my startup also has issues with, BUT: My startup is under 2 years old, in the same space, and with a much smaller team. We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces, and even released many other features that Twitch is only now also working on. We have regularly looked at this market and what keeps fueling twitch's success, and str…
> We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience. My point is, you haven't solved Twitch's problems at Twitch's scale .
Very true, that is a continual problem that even twitch hopefully has to address often. There are no simple answers as you scale an application. I was more addressing the feature set.
All a team can really do is setup an architecture that can theoretically scale, and then adjust as you reach higher and higher levels.
FWIW, our site is actually a pivot after a product that reached a higher unique per day than twitch currently has (99th globally vs 63rd globally according to alexa.com). And I can say from experience that scaling a real-time experience is MUCH harder than a more traditional web app experience. But the techniques are much the same, reach the scale, see what breaks, fix.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite is https://www.twitch.tv/fopt_membrillo . He streams pro Age of Empires 2 tournaments in the crazy Spanish soccer style, and his community (including me) support him enough that it's his full-time job. Full-time AoE2 streamer in 2016??? I think that's amazing. An example of a crazy moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrxXKK8oIyE
Speaking of AoE2, I think Resonance22 has a really good voice and is great at explaining the game while playing/spectating. Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo-qAVGb5vQ (He's not doing it full-time.) AoE2 HD really got me back into PC gaming after a decade of only touching Wii/Wii U/mobile games. I'm not yet sure if it can drag me into watching Twitch, though.
Resonance22 is indeed fantastic, and very professional. I know he wants to make a career of casting/gaming at some point and I hope he manages to pull it off. T90Official is another great AoE2 caster in a similar style to Resonance22.
Same with me about AoE2 HD, I hadn't played a PC game for years until I tried it. Now I'm hooked on both playing and spectating. The $30k Clan Masters tournament going on right now is insane.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#169This whole industry of game streaming is operating in a gray zone. It's a matter of time before we see some big lawsuits against the streamer and streaming platforms which make a lot of money by publishing the whole content, without any royalties to game developers /publishers. For certain games. it doesn't spoil or ruin the fun factor for viewers, but some others it just removed the incentives to buy a copy of the g…
Then perhaps it will become necessary to design games for replayability, rather than on-rails linear stories. Games != movies. I don't see that as a bad development.
For some that would be a sad development. Certain able gamers depend upon a sliding scale of difficulty, and at the lower end it could be a slightly interactive movie like experience. Casual players too may prefer a simpler and story focused experience. Requiring a lot of branching and variation may limit story depth.
Re: Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think appletv will ever support Amazon video? The iOS app definitely needs chrome cast support.
Given that, e.g. amazon stopped selling Chromecast, I don't have high hopes for interoperability here.
Why do this to your customers. It means Amazon video money is wasted unless I own a fire stick--and who the hell owns a fire stick? The only reason to buy it is Amazon video!