Twitch is by far the largest live-streaming service on the Internet in the United States, according to analysts, with another livestream used by gamers, Ustream, coming in third place. Their volume easily dwarfs that of Major League Baseball, ESPN, CNN and NBC.
The video delivery and analytics company Qwilt published its findings yesterday, ranking the services by volume. Twitch clocked in at 43.6 percent of all live-streamed traffic, with the WWE — thanks to the launch of a new livestreaming service just this year — placing second, with 17.7 percent of livestreamed traffic.
Ustream, which is a streaming option throught the PlayStation 4's "Live from PlayStation" service, accounts for 10.9 percent of the traffic. Again, Qwilt measured these figures within U.S. broadband services.
In January, Twitch claimed an audience of 45 million monthly unique viewers, many of whom, Twitch said, were cutting down on time spent watching broadcast or cable TV to view its content. Twenty percent of its broadcasts over a two-week span stretching from December to January came from the PS4, Twitch added.
Its presence is so robust that even Justin.TV - the forerunner to Twitch (which was split off as gaming-only content in 2011, before becoming the name of the entire company) — comes in sixth place at 1.2 percent.
The figures are for livestreamed content — video services such as Netflix, Google/YouTube and Amazon, which serve non-live content — are still well ahead in the total volume of video consumption.
For more on the history of Twitch and Justin.tv, see this profile of the company'srise from a niche service to a media juggernaut.
