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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

#381

Earlier 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.

They embed other hosts, most of the websites usually use the same hosts but with different frontends slapped on top.

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

#382
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely! That would be a great idea. They could leverage their know how to scan for product placement depending on category you are in. It would seem far more in line.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twit…

> So AFIK Kick isn't likely to make it longer, except maybe as legally and ethically questionable gambling paltform You can't just say they are going to fail if we disclude the main reason why they are going to succeed! There is a ton of money in gambling. That's why it's a very serious competitor. They have a rare luxury of being able to tell advertisers to shove it, if they can make all their money doing gambling c…

the problem with gambling is its often not legal to advertise it too much, so many of the streams doing so either are in a legal gray area or outright illegal in many EU countries

worse a lot of gambling is deeply intertwined with organized crime in many countries

so if they as long as they have gambling they basically have no much chance to succeed in many areas which are not gambling on a wider scale and might outright bared from operating in some countries without 18+ age verification, too

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.

So now you’re saying a company is not allowed to branch out and have any other applications on their own servers? Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?

If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you’re saying a company is not allowed to branch out and have any other applications on their own servers? Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?

If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.

AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates.

You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.

This is not at all how it works. Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere. Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable". The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still c…

How do you know Twitch is "buying" AWS servers so cheaply though?

Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.

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

#387

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…

Most of their cost will be infrastructure. Encoding and serving multiple streams per channel to different devices with a low buffer must be expensive.

On the other hand: they host everything on AWS. Which Amazon owns. So while Twitch might make a loss the parent company might be perfectly happy making up the difference in AWS profits.

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

#388
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things.

Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and kept going up the chain until the director said just pay the VAT. after countless emails, meetings, and other time wasting activities, VAT ended up being 8 euros. Bean counters create drama to justify their bean counting.

I'm sure there are good reasons for them. But they are often simply in the way.

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things. Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and k…

Bored engineers tend to over-engineer and build overly clever systems. I guess bean counters get bored too.

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

#390
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd never heard of broadcast.com before, it is the inspiration for ROI (Radio on the Internet) and Russ Hanneman?
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