Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't work when you channel hop on a regular basis.
Twitch still has Nitro, which removes ads for all channels
Nitro is Discord, Twitch has Turbo.
Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
321–330 of 482 posts
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
For them, content is free.
I still don't get how so many 123movies clones can keep popping up with seemingly every TV show and movie there, with probably nearly all users using ad-blockers and very few possible advertisers in the first place. They get taken down regularly then presumably deal with the effort of moving elsewhere. They don't seem to be p2p either, they have some server. Maybe it's stolen infra.
A lot of the pirate streaming services I see are either using torrents on the backend or they're abusing normal video hosting services and just replacing links that get taken down so that when the sites/apps themselves die they only need a new domain/app to point at the the same files on those same services instead of moving TBs of files around
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
For them, content is free.
I still don't get how so many 123movies clones can keep popping up with seemingly every TV show and movie there, with probably nearly all users using ad-blockers and very few possible advertisers in the first place. They get taken down regularly then presumably deal with the effort of moving elsewhere. They don't seem to be p2p either, they have some server. Maybe it's stolen infra.
Most don't host the content themselves. They iframe or whatever other hosts.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff, and I wouldn’t agree they’ve had “a lot” of downtime. Most of the drop in ad revenue is a consequence of content management decisions that seem to be a matter of principle for the company’s new owner. It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly ; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to…
> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic. It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base. And now there's…
> Firing the Trust and Safety team
Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy.
And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other platforms turn into under the foul influence of advertisers and I’m frankly not interested. If that means it has to be subsidized by an eccentric billionaire out of principle, so what? Other billionaires subsidize much more toxic outlets, the Washington Post for instance.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#325Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bandwidth was obviously never the problem for Amazon. It was the actual content. How do you monetize Twitch streamers and, more importantly, Twitch stream viewers? They never figured that out, even at Amazon-scale.
Force people who want to sell on Amazon Marketplace to dedicate product to and pay for placement within Twitch streams. Then identify those products in the streams and spam the viewers & chat with purchase links and content streams that contain related recommended products. Turn the whole thing into a self-referential product placement & affiliate scheme.
Depending on how in in-your-face that is, it might just kill the platform. I don't have any definitive answers but maybe if they ramped up their own game development studios, and flooded the ecosystem with them, they might see some return on investment (people paying for micro transactions basically) that seems like a semi-organic fit for the platform.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#327Earlier 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…
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’m the founder and cto of a niche streaming platform. You don’t need to be google scale. You do need a different business model.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Free peering always was just "Hey, I have 10GB of transit to push to you, and you have about the same, let's keep the beancounters out of this."
As consumer Internet grew, that became more and more unstable, until Netflix hit and just absolutely overwhelmed it.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#329Not 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…
>> Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. >This ... is wild, I had no idea Twitch wasn't profitable Indeed very wild. Ironic too, considering the co-founder (Michael Siebel) is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.
All YC and VC-types care about is that the companies they either invest in or are associated with get a fat check from an acquisition or IPO. After that, they can fail for all they care.
Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
#330Weird 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.
I was laid of January 2023 and looking back, it was decided in late November/early December. I even remember a managers/CTO-only meeting during an engineering-wide offsite that reeked of secrecy/sketchiness.