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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

#261

Post by golergka »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #188
golergka wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overload…

> e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)

Actually, the opposite is true.

If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix.

But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming.

In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.

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

#262

Post by andirk »

scarface_74 wrote: post #214
tempestn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind being advised by someone who created a business and sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars, lack of profitability notwithstanding.

So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion

That broadcast.com to Yahoo and Tom selling Myspace to Murdoch are 2 of my favorite flop acquisitions. Honorable mention: Digg selling its soul to their own sales team.

However, Geocities to Yahoo is one of my least fave.

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

#263

Post by dvngnt_ »

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.

I watch 8-12 long videos on YouTube, but I get your point

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

#264

Post by glenngillen »

raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I’ve never been the target audience for this, so sharing anecdata with a sample size of 1 (well, 2 kids). But as I type this my kids are watching some streamer play minecraft on our TV. They’re watching it via YouTube though. I don’t know the last time they used Twitch, and I suspect the youngest doesn’t even know how to get there.

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

#265

Post by no_wizard »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #129
no_wizard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They already hail largely from top 50 colleges[0][1], for instance.

We know that Ivy League graduates have better access to opportunity and privilege than anyone else, there's enough out there on this that I would consider it common knowledge by now.

[0]: https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/schools/which-college...

[1]: Note, I didn't say Ivy league, but arisotricatic institutions. These include many state universities with large alumni endowments and historical privileges.

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

#266

Post by dathinab »

wozniacki wrote: post #210
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…

Also not mentioned is the recent rise of Ad-Free ( yes completely AD-FREE as in not a single ad ever! ) platforms like KICK.com [1][2] Amouranth used to stream exclusively on Twitch.com but now has moved mostly to Kick.com and streams the majority of her time there. In this respect, Twitch's draconian content policing needs mentioning. People would receive week-long bans for unnamed reasons or super petty things. The…

Kick has the same cost or more then Twitch (they use the exact same infrastructure under the hood,it's a service sold by Amazone to Twitch and others).

They saved some cost on building the UI etc. by well semi-stealing it from Twitch after a leak but that's just a saving bootstrapping cost not long term operation cost.

When it comes to general advertisement friendliness they are far worse then Twitch, i.e. where Twitch struggles to sell AD slots Kick probably wouldn't even bother.

Like many other start up like companies Kick is not currently profitable and lives from investor capital hoping to make it through.

Kick is deeply intertwined with gambling and many streamers on it frequently are in legal gray area when it comes to gambling law in the EU, they tried to somewhat get way from it but AFIK failed for now.

Kick has many streamers which are often seen as ethical problematic, like being associated with neo-Nazis, making it a no go for most advertisers. But also many streamers stay away from it for that reason and also (maybe more so) the gambling reason.

So AFIK Kick isn't likely to make it longer, except maybe as legally and ethically questionable gambling paltform.

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

#267

Post by Andrex »

dathinab wrote: post #233
TheRealPomax wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thin calling it a subdevvision is already an overstatement I think it's not even that. Amazone provides something like a "live streaming infrastructure service" which they sell to Twitch and others (including the competition like Kick). For them buying Twitch was good as it allowed them to thoroughly test that service somewhat "in-house", have an initial customer for it to show what it can do etc. But now that this…

Why do you keep calling it Amazone across multiple comments?

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

#268

Post by genmud »

timr wrote: post #216
benwilber0 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I don't know about "Google scale", but you definitely need to be able to peer to get the costs under control. That requires a certain level of investment (on the order of millions of dollars in hardware/datacenter costs), plus the human relationships to get the peering agreements done. Twitch absolutely had that in place, so it's not really fair to compare it to a hobby project and conclude the business model doesn't…

I feel like free peering is a thing of the past. Verizon/Comcast killed it by forcing people to pay for peering relations about a decade ago.

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

#269

Post by ctroein89 »

prox wrote: post #151
ctroein89 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 monetizati…

It’s too bad they are so unimaginative when it comes to that. I mean at the very least they should hand controls to the streamer to run an ad: right now it’s the algorithm that does it. Also they should primarily look at other ways to monetize. Subs are still the best way, but not everyone has that kind of money. One other big problem is that there former heads just didn’t get streamers and they ran a lot of big ones…

Twitch should have offered a merchandising business via Amazon. It feels like Twitch should have understood how their streamers make money, and ensure that all of that monetization happens via Amazon in some way shape or form, whether that’s a print-on-demand business or facilitating product placements.

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

#270

Post by dathinab »

Andrex wrote: post #267
dathinab wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thin calling it a subdevvision is already an overstatement I think it's not even that. Amazone provides something like a "live streaming infrastructure service" which they sell to Twitch and others (including the competition like Kick). For them buying Twitch was good as it allowed them to thoroughly test that service somewhat "in-house", have an initial customer for it to show what it can do etc. But now that this…

Why do you keep calling it Amazone across multiple comments?

I which I would know I don't know how often I already ended up on amazone.de (a site selling farming equipment) or amazone.com (redirects to amazon.fr for some reason), it's quite annoying ;=)
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