Twitch: when watching beats playing

Jayson Love is a 34-year-old broadcaster from Montana. On Twitch, he is better known as "MAN." His stream, MANvsGAME, broadcasts his mission to "beat every game worth a damn ... and even some that aren't." Four years ago, Love was struggling to make a living working various retail jobs. Today, he live-streams on Twitch full-time and makes more money than any job he's previously held. He is one of Twitch's most popular streamers, broadcasting for up to eight hours every night to an average of 4,000 viewers who regularly tune in.

"Twitch has completely changed my life for the better," Love says. "It's almost too much to think about sometimes. I went from these dead-end retail jobs with no real long-term plan or goal, and Twitch has allowed me to become something of a minor e-celebrity, which is crazy to think about. My mother was talking to one of the guys she works with about my broadcast, and he said he knew me and told her he watched me all the time."

Love first started live-streaming four years ago on Twitch competitor UStream after seeing American comedian and rapper Andy Milonakis freestyle rap while incorporating lyrics that viewers posted into the UStream chat box. Having never seen this kind of interactive broadcast before, Love says he was blown away and decided that he should do something similar with video games. "The big punchline to this joke was I thought I was brilliant and sitting on this golden idea no one else had," he says. "Then I went onto UStream and saw all these other people doing it."

Love wanted his stream to be different, though. He wanted it to be like a show. He wanted to do it to entertain viewers. The broadcast would be about him struggling to beat certain games, but it wouldn't be eSports. "It's one man's struggle, so there's some drama in that," he laughs. "But a lot of it is just me trying to be funny, trying to make people laugh. It's like a performance for me. I am absolutely performing, and it's draining, but I love it."

In the early days, Love's stream had fewer than 10 viewers. Over the course of four years, this audience slowly and steadily grew. As UStream and its competitor Justin.tv (from which Twitch spun off) grew and added new features, Love would move his show back and forth based on which features he liked best. He eventually settled on Justin.tv because he liked its video player. When Twitch launched, he moved over with the rest of Justin.tv's gaming content.

Bill and Jason Munkel are another popular pair of broadcasters on Twitch. Bill, 58, and Jason, 18, run the channel FatherSonGaming. Each night, father and son broadcast themselves playing Call of Duty together. The channel is a year old and averages 2,000-3,000 viewers a night. The pair have 130,000 followers on Twitch.

"It was actually my idea," says Jason. "I specifically remember being in the car, and I used to watch a lot of YouTube videos of Call of Duty commentators, and I remember thinking that Dad and I have something unique. Not many fathers and sons play Call of Duty together. It's kind of an unusual thing. And I remember thinking this would be cool if we could post these videos of ourselves on the internet. We could be different [than] what everyone else is doing."

Jason pitched the idea to his father Bill who, as a lifelong gamer, thought it was neat. "We have a great bond, and we thought it would be a good idea, and that was how it was born," Bill says.

The duo started by recording themselves playing Call of Duty and uploading those videos to YouTube. The videos were never really about the game — they were about Bill and Jason's relationship. Sometimes they'd post videos of themselves goofing around, dancing to music. Viewers got a kick out of it, and the two liked interacting with the community they built around their little show. "Our whole thing was always about interaction," Jason says. "We loved talking to people, responding to every comment, seeing the reactions. That was my favorite part of it."

"And people get a kick out of me because they wanna see how a guy my age can keep up with these young guys and this game," Bill says. "And I generally don't, but every once in a while, I'll surprise myself. I'll do really, really well, and all our viewers get excited because I did really, really well."

FatherSonGaming made the switch to Twitch after Jason saw the opportunity to do their show live. "I saw there was this immediate, live interaction. You could talk to people right there as they were watching. I thought it was amazing."

Bill and Jason stream for about three hours each evening and stick to a weekly schedule. While the two have always played games together, Bill says their Twitch channel has changed their relationship. "We were always close, but Twitch has brought us even closer than I could ever imagine," he says. "We're together all the time, whether we're streaming or thinking of ideas to do for our streams. Our relationship has grown immensely because of how often we're together, and I think we owe Twitch that."

Shear pins Twitch's success to its focus: It's the only streaming service that devotes all its energy to gaming. "I don't think there's any real doubt about that," Shear says. "We won [the video game live-streaming audience] because of focus. We were 100 percent dedicated and focused on doing whatever it takes to get the very best gaming content ... That was the only thing we thought about, and when you're trying to build something that's good for everyone, it's hard to beat someone who's making something that's good for just one segment, because they're superfocused.

"For every hour some other company could spend on gaming, we could spend 10 because that was the only thing we were doing."

This focus led to tools that differentiate Twitch from the competition. The technology behind Twitch gives users options specific to video game streaming.

"For example, when you're broadcasting a game like League of Legends or Dota or any MOBA (multiplayer-online battle arena), it's critically important that no one be able to see your stream for about six minutes, because there are certain items you can buy that, knowing you have it, is a big advantage to the other team," Shear says. "So you really don't want the other team to find that out in advance.

"If you're in a tournament, and the results really matter, it's critical that it doesn't leak. So we built in a delay server that lets you choose how much delay you want on your stream, which seems totally counterintuitive. Normally, you're trying to reduce latency for video, not increase it. But in this particular case, to run this kind of tournament you need a delay server. You can't not have that feature.

"When we built this feature, we won this huge chunk of content that had been waiting for someone to build this for them."

Advertising is also built with the video game streamer in mind. Twitch currently has more than 5,100 partner channels — streams run by ordinary people, like MANvsGAME and FatherSonGaming, who make money from broadcasting. Instead of having ads popping up at set intervals that could potentially disrupt a stream during an important part of a game, Twitch lets its users choose when they want to run an ad. So between matches, a streamer can hit a button to run a string of ads, and they get a cut of the revenue share. Depending on how many viewers tune into a channel, a broadcaster could feasibly make a living of being a Twitch streamer. Twitch's VP of Marketing Matthew DiPietro can't reveal how much its broadcasters are taking home, but says that some of them are able to live quite comfortably just from revenue earned from Twitch advertising. How comfortably? "Six figures," he says.

It's this focus on video games that attracted console manufacturers Sony and Microsoft when they were looking to implement live-streaming into their new consoles.

"I think there's some supersmart people who were paying attention to the way things were going and realized that streaming was now a big part of the experience," Green says of Microsoft and Sony, the latter of which launched the PlayStation 4 with Twitch integration on day one. "It was good forward thinking on their part."

Chad Gibson is the general manager of Xbox, where he oversees Xbox Live, Achievements, multiplayer and Twitch integration. He says Microsoft initially brought the Twitch app onto Xbox 360, which allowed users to access Twitch and watch streams through their console. The response, he says, was huge, and highlighted the importance of streaming for the next generation of consoles. When it came time to develop the Xbox One, live-streaming had gained such momentum that it couldn't be ignored. Twitch, he says, was an obvious choice.

"I think their focus on gaming is phenomenal," Gibson says. "I mean, there's been other streaming companies, but they've all been more general in nature. Twitch's focus on gaming really helps provide a product that the community has really responded to."

Gibson says when he first started working with Twitch, the competitive play angle made sense to him, but he didn't realize interest in live-streaming went beyond eSports.

"I was thinking of the best Call of Duty players in the world and how I'd love to see them play," he says. "And then I remembered when we first met with Twitch and they said Minecraft was superpopular, too, and that was one of the first facts that just blew my mind, because it's not a competitive game. It's a game about building worlds and creating and collaborating. It's got a phenomenal presence on Twitch, and it made me realize that it spans far beyond the competitive eSports angle."

Developers are now using Twitch to show their games to the public before they're completed. Publishers are using Twitch as a marketing tool to speak directly to consumers, and users are creating their own form of entertainment and breathing new life into games that launched years ago.

Microsoft's Xbox One Twitch integration is a relatively recent addition, but Twitch has already shown its popularity among console users via the PlayStation 4. In early January, Sony reported that from Dec. 23-Jan. 3, 20 percent of Twitch broadcasts came from PS4 owners. In the first six weeks following the console's launch, PS4 owners created 1.7 million streams. Of course, not everyone initially understood that the console's Twitch functionality was reserved for video game content. The service had to be pulled from the PS4's Playroom — a feature that points the PS4's camera at the player and turns the living room into an interactive experience — because people were streaming non-gaming material, some of which was raunchier than Twitch and Sony were willing to broadcast. But people are slowly getting it.

"Having it built into the system legitimizes Twitch beyond anything they could have done on their own. It's basically sending a message that this is part of the PS4 and Xbox One experience now. We're telling you this is not some extra third-party thing that only weird people do. This is part of the experience of owning this console."

The service isn't perfect, though. As a relatively new platform that is dealing with enormous amounts of data and a rapidly growing user base, it's encountering teething issues. "The kinds of problems they're dealing with are the best kind of problems to have," Love says. "They're bandwidth costs, and they just have too many people coming to the site. So much that, for instance, their chat is constantly breaking."

During busy weekends, particularly when there is a big game tournament or, most recently, when thousands of users decided to play a game together, Twitch's chat function will struggle to keep up. Sometimes it won't show new messages. Sometimes it will freeze up entirely.

"They're going to need to scale appropriately," says Green. "I don't think there's a chance of this right now, but Twitch could become a victim of its own success just in terms of its ability to scale and keep up with the demand the sheer volume of people using it."

[According to a Twitch representative, "We remedied the chat issue with Twitch Plays Pokemon by moving the channel off of our general chat servers onto a dedicated event chat server, which we typically use for large events like The International and League Championship Series (LCS)."]