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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#121

Post by dangus »

londons_explore wrote: post #71
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

> Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product. Elon discovered this the hard way.

This is an “inside a bubble” take.

The idea that software engineers at Twitter are influential on the platform is laughable.

How many of these accounts are software engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#122

Post by jron »

I frequently kept a twitch pop-out in the corner of my screen throughout the day. When uBlock stopped working, I almost immediately stopped using the site. Video interruptions are pretty awful for live content where channel switching is a regular occurrence.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#123

Post by belthesar »

covercash wrote: post #93
bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side… They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce b…

This is interesting, as I had an idea to do this when I was working on a competitor service during lockdown. Our idea was to use this to cut the cost on transcoded renditions, and for streamers that didn't have the ability to generate multiple renditions but still wanted them, we would offer it as a service in exchange for a higher cut of their revenue. That said, if anyone gets a benefit from lower quality renditions being distributed, it's Twitch.

If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.

So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#124

Post by ctroein89 »

wnevets wrote: post #104
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?

Video is expensive, and streamers don’t like ads.

Amazon has for years been saying that they think that Twitch is under monetized. In their minds, 20% of watch time could be ads, just like regular TV. Streamers don’t like ads: it kills the vibe when your audience gets a 2 minute timeout. So streamers aren’t running enough ad breaks, and try to support themselves via memberships, merch and other alternative monetization methods. And for some, Twitch is only advertising for the real money-maker on another site. So Amazon doesn’t get the ad money they think they should get, and they only get a cut of memberships.

So then it’s a question of how many servers and engineers are needed to support Twitch, because that will determine profitability.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#125

Post by dangus »

gurchik wrote: post #95
joegibbs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the ad policy?

Twitch will run preroll ads on your stream unless you elect to run at least 3 minutes of ads per hour. These preroll ads have a huge effect on viewership because new viewers who tune in to an immediate ad will typically just leave. So, these "elective" ads are not very optional. But, this is a lose-lose situation, because these elective ads are very disruptive to viewers too. They are often implemented as a 90 second…

And here’s the other thing: why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?

I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.

At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#126

Post by timr »

hot_gril wrote: post #108
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

I imagine live video is a lot more expensive too. Can't just throw that on a CDN. And unlike YT or TikTok videos with sort of a time limit, Twitch streams can run for hours, chewing up bandwidth while so many "viewers" are giving divided attention at best.

> Can't just throw that on a CDN.

You'd be surprised. I have no idea what Twitch does now, but when it was JTV, we had quite a bit of our streaming video on CDNs. We built a complex infrastructure to arbitrage bandwidth.

But yeah, if you do it naïvely, you'll hemorrhage money.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#127

Post by blasphemers »

edgyquant wrote: post #89
londons_explore wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them. Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

Or, rather, they are paying what they think are some of the best people in the world not to go out and start the competition.

No company actually does this, they are just bloated because they have so much money and managers rank/value is determined by how many people they manage.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#128

Post by darkerside »

wnevets wrote: post #104
lchengify wrote: post #92

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1] TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends. > Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, th…

How is it possible for them not to be profitable? Don't they take a 50% cut on subs?

I wonder how much AWS gouges them on price

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#129

Post by VirusNewbie »

no_wizard wrote: post #25
edgyquant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

Be born in the aristocracy[0] or land one of the very small openings where executives get hired from outside the circle via executive recruiting, which usually means networking your way to VP / SVP at a some kind of notable firm or otherwise getting close to attainment of the executive class. I hear being an ex-founder is useful in this regard. Apparently, working at McKinsey or Bain or one of the other large "presti…

It seems like we could check this. Is your hypothesis that an outsized number of SVP/EVP at top paying tech companies are going to be from either dynastic wealth or from traditional Ivy backgrounds?

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#130

Post by hakdbha »

refulgentis wrote: post #86
matrix_overload wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

The problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms. Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negoti…

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