July 26: How justin.tv became Twitch

Source: Business Insider
Published: October 2014

How justin.tv became Twitch

Twitch is the most popular video game live-streaming site, capturing 43.6% of live-streaming traffic and 1.8% of peak internet traffic in the United States.

But Twitch had a humble birth as justin.tv, a site that founder Justin Kan created to live-stream his life reality-show style. Instead of showcasing their day-to-day, users wanted to livestream their video gaming. Kan immediately hired a video game streaming specialist to help people set up their own streams and justin.tv evolved into Twitch.

Kan owes his startup success to solving a problem others had. 55 million users watch Twitch streams every month.

Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for $970 million. In 2020 Twitch was estimated to be worth $15 billion.