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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

#161

Post by wnevets »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #133
wnevets wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Live streaming 1080p 60fps video to a channel with even just a few hundred viewers is a staggering amount of data that you need to push out. Multiply that by thousands of simultaneous streams, and the numbers don't look good. Because even though "Amazon" might be able to afford to send out all that data, "a subdivision owned by Amazon" still has to balance the budget and show that it can cover the cost for its slice…

> Live streaming 1080p 60fps video to a channel with even just a few hundred viewers

I've been in streams with less than 100 viewers and seen hundreds of dollars in bits & gifted subs being spent in a single hype train. Are those really unprofitable for Twitch?

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

#162

Post by gurchik »

dangus wrote: post #125
gurchik wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?

First of all, an Amazon Prime subscription soon won't even remove ads from Amazon Video, so why would it be any different for Twitch?

Second of all, a channel subscription (through Amazon Prime or otherwise) removes ads from that channel. If you want an ad free experience across the whole site, Twitch Turbo is $11.99 USD.

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

#163

Post by timr »

hot_gril wrote: post #150
timr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, I figured you can place it on a CDN carefully, but it's not nearly as easy as with non-live video which I'd describe more as "throwing" it on there. And even with the complex infra already built, it must be still more expensive to operate. Everything you cache is only good for 10-15s.

It's more similar than you might think. The big problem is dealing with the bursty nature of live video -- lots of people will start watching a live event at the same time, which can easily trip you over into expensive bandwidth tier for the peak streams. You need to be able to react in real time and reallocate connections to cheaper providers, shape traffic, use peering arrangements, etc. Static video providers have the luxury of time, and can make these decisions slowly.

I forget the exact numbers, but it wasn't totally uncommon for early JTV to burn tens of thousands of dollars on a single stream before we got it under control. Someone starts a stream of a soccer game involving (say) Turkey, and it was like lighting money on fire. The whole event might be over before you could flag the thing down.

But like any other form of video, most streams get no viewers, and are relatively cheap to host when you have a scaled infrastructure.

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

#164

Post by ibbih »

kevinventullo wrote: post #153
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

Why does “content is essentially free” apply to TikTok and not Twitch?

Twitch pays streamers?

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

#165

Post by prox »

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…

The 70/30 is back again from early this year though in the form of “Partner Plus” , you need 300 subpoints for 3 months to be eligible for it.

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

#166

Post by NegativeK »

rapfaria wrote: post #98
thih9 wrote: post #54

Weird to see layoffs at the beginning of the year, when fresh budgets and plans are availiable. Then again, since this is happening this early, this is probably a 2023 decision.

Don't U.S companies have their fiscal year wrapped around June?

US companies can define their own fiscal year.

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

#167

Post by dragonwriter »

golly_ned wrote: post #143
huytersd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re an eng and not using ChatGPT/copilot you’re going to get left behind pretty soon.

It's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong about something that I can easily see and point out and often verify by finding documentation or testing. I don't know how many times I've asked a question and told the wrong thing.

> It's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong

There is no GPT-4.5. Current OpenAI GPT models include various date and context-size checkpoints of 3.5-turbo, 4, and (in preview) 4-turbo.

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

#168

Post by kevinventullo »

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.

Competition is less of a concern when VC’s are tight with their money.

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

#169

Post by seabrookmx »

kevinventullo wrote: post #153
kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

Why does “content is essentially free” apply to TikTok and not Twitch?

Because the top twitch streamers earn a decent living, whereas TikTok creators are paid (basically) nothing.

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

#170

Post by benwilber0 »

kenhwang wrote: post #148
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've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc.

It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also finding that out.

[1] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

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