It was 2009. I was in college when I got to know of this website called Justin.tv via a friend. It was crazy. People were broadcasting their lives like a reality show and just about anything they wanted to. There were various categories and one of them, people broadcasting their screen and audio while playing video games was growing swiftly. Fast forward, Justin.tv transformed into Twitch, got itself acquired by Amazon in 2014 and as of 2020, some streamers earn over 5,000 dollars in a day literally sleeping cozily in front of their subscribers. The top game streamers earn an order of magnitude more every day, with some of them even being offered multi-million exclusivity deals.
Live streaming is not limited to gaming and Twitch though. Youtube is making significant investments to push live streaming on the leading video platform. Facebook is working hard with the Facebook Gaming (and it already has a crippled Insta live going for them). Microsoft had one too with Mixer until they shut it down a few months ago. Even the humble Reddit has a live stream service now. Selling e-commerce products on live streams is a thing now, with major platforms adding support for it. China has banned Twitch but has an entire culture around streaming with its homegrown insanely popular streaming service YY Live (YY.com apparently has 300 million users.)
The Red vs Purple war
While various platforms have been vying to be the streaming leader, it is still dominated by Twitch and to an extent by Youtube. Twitch also saw an increase of 62 percent in total hours watched in Q2 2020 over Q1 possibly due to the lockdown around the world. Twitch also launched a separate esports directory during the lockdown in April this year. Twitch is primarily live stream to the point where old broadcasts are deleted from the user’s channel. Youtube is still operating as a video platform with messy live streaming discovery bolted on top of channels.
Streamers looking to monetize on Twitch start with their affiliate program where they could earn from subscriptions by viewers (starting from 4.99 USD), Twitch bits which are virtual goods with a one-time payment, or doing product placement of games and the affiliate revenue that follows. Affiliates transition into the Twitch partner program after meeting certain conditions on the number of users and streaming time which adds a lot more revenue streams including ad revenue sharing and custom bits, emojis, and badges. There are other monetization options like sponsorships wherein a game developer like EA might pay some of the top Twitch game streamers say a dollar per hour per user of live gameplay of their new game. Sponsorships generally include a recurring engagement on other social platforms like paid Insta posts and tweets.
YouTube Live streams have a simpler monetization model with ads and superchats, which are essentially a variable amount paid to highlight a message that you write in the chatbox while the stream is going on (it is almost an unsaid rule on Youtube to read out loud superchats which are significantly ‘expensive’.) YouTube subscriptions are still free but there is an option to turn on tier-based membership. Essentially YouTube knows what works due to Twitch and can experiment better.
I have been really curious about why do people pay for content that they are already getting for free (except for certain add-ons like custom emojis). I have no idea, maybe it just boils down to human behavior.
The hardware and software
A good quality live streaming requires a significant amount of investment. It starts with a green screen to be attached as a background, which allows easy background removal and replacement with broadcasting software. Some other basic pieces of equipment include a powerful computer to not lag while streaming and gaming simultaneously, specialty lights, cameras, quality microphones, and headphones.
One of the most common pieces of software used is the open-source software OBS along with other commercial alternatives like from the likes of Elgato, allowing various on-screen functions and automation like showing gratitude to a new subscriber with a small GIF in a corner of the screen during a live stream. Nvidia released a broadcast app this week that uses its flagship RTX series of GPUs to replace backgrounds and background noise from live streams and video calls in realtime.
After all these years, streaming is still growing at an explosive rate with major platforms still getting their act right. There could be a surge of products targeting streamers or users on the platforms in the coming years. With wearables like Apple Glass supposed to come next year, it would be interesting to see if new forms of media or content come out of these new platforms.
Other things that matter
Amid the SEC investigation in electric vehicle company Nikola, it was discovered that it had lied about a prototype video of an electric truck, which was just rolling downhill on its own. Sigh. Apple is continuing its services push with a new bundled all-in-one service (aptly called Apple One) on offer which would include TV+, Music, additional iCloud storage, and Arcade. It has also released a Fitness+ app which can be used to show useful info on say an iPad using an Apple watch as the data collection mechanism. Nvidia has closed its ARM acquisition form 40 billion USD. At the same time, SiFive is planning to release a developer-oriented RISC-V PC.
That’s all for this weekend, see you next week.