What is it?

Twitch is a video live streaming service operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.Introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform, Justin.tv, the site primarily focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, in addition to music broadcasts, creative content, and more recently, "in real life" streams. Content on the site can be viewed either live or via video on demand. The popularity of Twitch eclipsed that of its general-interest counterpart. In October 2013, the website had 45 million unique viewers,and by February 2014, it was considered the fourth largest source of peak Internet traffic in the United States. At the same time, Justin.tv's parent company was re-branded as Twitch Interactive to represent the shift in focus – Justin.tv was shut down in August 2014. That month, the service was acquired by Amazon for US$970 million, which later led to the introduction of synergies with the company's subscription service Amazon Prime. Twitch later acquired Curse, an operator of online video gaming communities and introduced means to purchase games through links on streams along with a program allowing streamers to receive commissions on the sales of games that they play. By 2015, Twitch had more than 1.5 million broadcasters and 100 million viewers per month.As of 2017, Twitch remained the leading live streaming video service for video games in the US, and had an advantage over YouTube Gaming.As of May 2018, it had 2.2 million broadcasters monthly and 15 million daily active users, with around a million average concurrent users.As of May 2018, Twitch had over 27,000 partner channels.

History

When Justin.tv was launched in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, the site was divided into several content categories. The gaming category grew especially fast, and became the most popular content on the site.In June 2011,the company decided to spin off the gaming content as TwitchTV, inspired by the term twitch gameplay. It launched officially in public beta on June 6, 2011.Since then, Twitch has attracted more than 35 million unique visitors a month.Twitch had about 80 employees in June 2013,which increased to 100 by December 2013.The company was headquartered in San Francisco's Financial District. Twitch has been supported by significant investments of venture capital, with US$15 million in 2012 (on top of US$7 million originally raised for Justin.tv),and US$20 million in 2013.Investors during three rounds of fund raising leading up to the end of 2013 included Draper Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.In addition to the influx of venture funding, it was believed in 2013 that the company had become profitable. Especially since the shutdown of its direct competitor Own3d.tv in early 2013, Twitch has become the most popular e-sports streaming service by a large margin, leading some to conclude that the website has a "near monopoly on the market".Competing video services, such as YouTube and Dailymotion, began to increase the prominence of their gaming content to compete, but have had a much smaller impact so far.As of mid-2013, there were over 43 million viewers on Twitch monthly, with the average viewer watching an hour and a half a day.As of February 2014, Twitch is the fourth largest source of Internet traffic during peak times in the United States, behind Netflix, Google, and Apple. Twitch makes up 1.8% of total US Internet traffic during peak periods. In late 2013, particularly due to increasing viewership, Twitch had issues with lag and low frame rates in Europe.Twitch has subsequently added new servers in the region.Also in order to address these problems, Twitch implemented a new video system shown to be more efficient than the previous system. Initially, the new video system was criticised by users because it caused a significant stream delay, interfering with broadcaster-viewer interaction.Twitch staff said that the increased delay was likely temporary and at the time, was an acceptable tradeoff for the decrease in buffering. Growth, acquisition speculation On February 10, 2014, Twitch's parent company (Justin.tv, Inc.) was renamed Twitch Interactive, reflecting the increased prominence of the service over Justin.tv as the company's main business.[29] That same month, a stream known as Twitch Plays Pokémon, a crowdsourced attempt to play Pokémon Red using a system translating chat commands into game controls, went viral. By February 17, the channel reached over 6.5 million total views and averaged concurrent viewership between 60 and 70 thousand viewers with at least 10% participating. Vice President of Marketing Matthew DiPietro praised the stream as "one more example of how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends WAY beyond the original intent of the game creator. By merging a video game, live video and a participatory experience, the broadcaster has created an entertainment hybrid custom made for the Twitch community. This is a wonderful proof of concept that we hope to see more of in the future."Beginning with its 2014 edition, Twitch was made the official live streaming platform of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. On May 18, 2014, Variety first reported that Google had reached a preliminary deal to acquire Twitch through its YouTube subsidiary for approximately US$1 billion.