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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

#461

Post by panick21_ »

theGnuMe wrote: post #350
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 understand why multicast isn't used. I imagine starlink multicast will become a thing and maybe we will all get transceivers. Everything old will becomes new again...

The more important question is not why no multicast, but why no torrent style stream where the viewers themselves share with other viewers.

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

#462

Post by andirk »

ID1452319 wrote: post #390
andirk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably! It was literally putting radio broadcasts on the internet. Tuning in to a radio frequency of a sporting event far away was avant garde and wanted by many. No idea why Yahoo needed to buy someone's janky website with an idea I just explained in 1 sentence, but yeah Yahoo managed to tank it from several billions of $ down to nothing in about a year.

Coulda been the first music streaming service. I hope someone has the minutes to those Yahoo board meetings and makes a cartoon out of it.

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

#463

Post by heroprotagonist »

SergeAx wrote: post #460
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…

What about the OnlyFans model?

What, the 'get a bot to spam people every day, pretending to be you, to ask a ridiculous amount of money for short low-effort pieces of content from a random bucket until they figure it out and unsubscribe. Hope you can pull enough new suckers into this message loop to make it work out, while spending the majority of your time producing tons of new unique free content for other sites to drive people to your onlyfans" model?

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

#464

Post by blasphemers »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #447
blasphemers wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They explicitly did this in the 00's. Some circles of top companies over a decade ago were convicted for having anti-poaching agreements amongst each other. May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech…

The anti-poaching thing was something completely different. That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing. Also, anti-poaching agreement kept salaries lower, it didn't inflate them.

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

#465

Post by kridsdale1 »

jacquesm wrote: post #424
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…

It's interesting. I invented 'live streams' to the browser and when youtube and Twitch rose to prominence our days were numbered, simply because we weren't going to play the VC game. And now TikTok does the exact same thing that we were already doing in the 90's and makes enormous headway with it.

I’d love to know more about this backstory.

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

#466

Post by johnnyanmac »

blasphemers wrote: post #464
johnnyanmac wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explicitly did this in the 00's. Some circles of top companies over a decade ago were convicted for having anti-poaching agreements amongst each other. May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech…

The anti-poaching thing was something completely different. That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing. Also, anti-poaching agreement kept salaries lower, it didn't inflate them.

It goes both ways. They can't collude woth hundreds of studios so they offer top salaries to out-compete the bulk of competition. Then for the remaining studios who can pay, they sign the agreements so they don't keep trying to one-up each other. Which would be bad for their business if they start trying to bid 300k for every worker (which may be what they deserve, but companies will always penny pinch).

>That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing.

Aren't these synonymous? You either entrap a necessary employee with contracts and/or absolute top compensation becsuse they are useful or even vital. No one's colluding to keep a janirot wage low (well, society is, but it's no one entity you can sue).

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

#467

Post by itsTyrion »

ayberk wrote: post #196
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'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself. This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tou…

that 6 mbps for every viewer ain't paying for itself

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

#468

Post by itsTyrion »

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.

exactly. Let's assume 1k viewers and 2/3 of them watching on 'source' quality, which is usually 6 mbps. In this scenario, we're looking at 4 Gbps or 500 MB/s. For a 4h long stream that's 7.2TB! of bandwidth, just for one streamer, excluding the viewers on lower quality

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

#469

Post by itsTyrion »

ctroein89 wrote: post #124
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?

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…

Assuming 1k viewers, 2/3 of them watching on 'source' quality (6 mbps). In that case, a 4h stream nets 7.2TB! of egress to end users on highest quality on one channel alone.

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

#470

Post by itsTyrion »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #46
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…

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…

> think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think.

exactly. most people with good enough internet stream at 6 mbps CBR. A streamer with 1k viewers costs them several terabytes! egress for a quick 2 hour stream.

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