What is Twitch: A story of hindsight.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the website called Twitch at some point or another if you’ve browsed the internet for any considerable period of time. Or if you have people you know that are really into video games. It’s entered the main stream entertainment market with the crossover of celebrity movie stars, musicians, professional athletes, and famous figures sitting down with a controller or mouse/keyboard and indulging in a video game session with gamers broadcasting their endeavors online to meteoric rises of audiences.
What you probably didn’t know was where it came from, how it originated, and that Amazon purchased the company in 2014 for $970,000,000 — a bargain by today’s valuations.
The year was 2005. I started my college journey by entering the confines of a military service academy, on the banks of the Thames River, at a little engineering school in Connecticut. The most popular television shows during that time were American Idol, CSI, and Desperate Housewives; not that we as cadets would have any opportunity to enjoy them. You see as freshmen, the institution had a very regimented view on what we should be doing with our limited free-time and enjoying the pixels from a television set were far and away not in alignment with those views. Television, movies, video games, social media, and instant messaging platforms were all off-limits — specifically for freshmen in the hopes that every spare minute was applied to academic studies, adhering to military regulations, and physical fitness activities. This was a measure to ensure you acclimated to the time constraints placed on you in a new military academy environment.
After adjusting to the demands of the credit-packed schedule, we as cadets figured out that Youtube, which launched in February of 2005, gave us a platform that we could utilize in our dorm rooms from our issued laptops for entertainment purposes. Due in part because the only television sets accessible were in shared ‘dayrooms’ in our dormitories and as freshmen cadets, anytime you left the safe-haven of your dorm room you were easy targets for upperclass pestering. Youtube provided us a website for entertainment that fell outside of the archaic regulations enforced upon us — thank goodness for tech!
I tell people that I graduated from that small engineering school with a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering but also with a Minor in Youtube based on how familiar I became with the platform in terms of the countless hours spent consuming various forms of content from it’s extensive library.
Fast forward to 2007, and a website by the name of Justin.tv came online. At first, one of the co-founders, Justin Kan, debuted the site by broadcasting his life 24/7 as the sole form of content. Eventually, he stopped life-casting and started allowing other people to broadcast live-streaming video to the internet from his site. In contrast to Youtube’s format of filming, uploading, and then allowing users to view — Justin.tv focused on live streaming content, giving its audience the raw entertainment value of live broadcasts. That pivot and openness found a niche community consisting of people that played video games whom unsurprisingly found an audience of viewers that enjoyed watching their content. The audience generated, the viewers, were either captivated by the game’s narrative being played through by the broadcaster, the broadcaster’s high skill level, the broadcaster’s entertainment value, or a combination of all three traits — and a branch of Justin.tv called Twitch was born.
As the trend of cord-cutters across the antiquated cable television market continued as I graduated from college in 2009 with the advent of online streaming services, Amazon sought a means to capture additional market share by rolling out a streaming service of their own called Amazon Instant Video that gave additional benefits to it’s Prime membership and allowed members to stream Amazon content directly from their platform.
As time progressed, Twitch’s growing community outgrew Justin.tv’s general video content user base and the company fully committed to the gaming genre and renamed itself to Twitch.tv. Simultaneously it caught the eye of a company seeking to expand it’s online video streaming library — a company mentioned above called Amazon.
In February of 2014, Twitch encompassed the 4th largest source of peak Internet traffic within the United States trailing Netflix, Google (who bought Youtube in 2006 for $1.65 Billion in stock), and Apple. Twitch had a user base just north of 55 million at the time with the average user spending approximately 100 minutes per day on the platform digesting it’s massive trove of 15 billion minutes of content, with more coming each and every day. There were rumors that Google was in contention for buying out Twitch for approximately $1 billion at the time but the deal fell through supposedly along antitrust issues (with Google already owning Youtube). Instead, Amazon surprised everyone when they struck a deal and added Twitch to it’s growing online streaming service for $970,000,000 in a cash offering.
Twitch would go on to to continually grow as the cord cutting trend and mobile data usage skyrocketed where in March of 2020 there were over 3.8 million unique broadcasters utilizing the platform with 1.44 million concurrent viewers on average. These metrics put the platform in contention with the likes of Fox News and ESPN, in terms of viewership data — showcasing how big of a steal Amazon made when purchasing the growing company in 2014. ESPN by itself is valued at over $28 billion today, or roughly 18% of all of Disney’s market capitalization for comparison’s sake.
These correlations have aligned with gaming becoming a more mainstream hobby as Generation Y and millenials have grown up, entered the disposable income/consumption age, and do not value television sets as often as their parental counterparts — opting to digest their content via mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, or on personal computers) and ultimately changing the landscape for advertising companies whom relied on commercial breaks during regular programmed television packages since the advent of modern day television. These trends will continue as internet connected devices spread near and far through both the developed and developing worlds.
I attempted to grow out of gaming in my post-college years, believing naively that becoming an adult required oneself to let go of feeble past-times for more productive uses of time. What I found was that after a few years, my interests and level of enjoyment garnered from gaming far outweighed the self-pressures I had placed on myself to stop years previously. Gaming was a form of entertainment and a hobby that I enjoyed. I discovered Twitch as I re-entered the gaming community in 2016 with the release of The Division on Xbox and subsequently as I ascended to the Personal Computer (PC) gaming space with the release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in 2017.
I consider myself a proud member of the Twitch community as a gamer, broadcaster, and viewer and I’m excited to see where the future lies as society as a whole garner some insights into the proud community of gamers that I associate myself with through its platform.
