FIGURE 1-TWITCH CHANNEL
Twitch is the world’s leading streaming service which is also becoming another social media platform for gamers. It was launched on June 6, 2011 and is now owned by the American electronic commerce and cloud computing company, Amazon. Everyday over 10 million visitors watch streamers, and chat with them and other viewers in real-time. There are over 2.2 million unique content creators per month with an average of 106 minutes watched per person daily (Twitch.tv, 2017). According to a Twitch whitepaper by Meredith Xcelerated Marketing (2015),
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64.1% of Twitch users are between the ages 18 and 34 with a heavily male-skewed audience at an overwhelming percentage of 93.6%.
Twitch has even gone beyond just streaming video games with people livestreaming themselves doing things such as drawing, music playing, cooking, and building of model kits. It has ‘the fourth-highest website in peak Internet traffic in the United States’ (Burroughs & Rama, 2015) ‘behind Netflix, Apple, and Google, but ahead of Facebook, Amazon, and Hulu
(Fitzgerald & Wakabayashi, as cited in LifeCourse Associates, 2014).
Due to its ever-growing popularity and streamers becoming a form of online celebrities, Twitch has given streamers who attract a certain amount of views the opportunity to become an affiliate. The requirements to become affiliated with Twitch are:
• At least 8 hours of broadcast time in the last 30 days.
• At least 7 unique broadcast days in the last 30 days.
• An average of 3 concurrent viewers or more over the last 30 days
• At least 50 Followers.
Affiliates can have subscribers, spectators that financially support the streamer through a regular monthly subscription fee. According to Hamilton et al (2014), once the streamers are affiliated with Twitch, they would get a share of the revenue of adverts generated from their streams and would also have the ability to configure ways in which ads appear on the stream.
The revenue earned can vary between 2 and 5 US Dollars per 1000 views. The streamers sometimes provide incentives to their viewers such as chance to win a giveaway, receiving exclusive merchandise, or even a chance to play together with them.
By becoming a subscriber to a channel, one can get several benefits and features such as:
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Emotes: emoticons which are designed by that channel’s owner and can be used
on any other channel or chatroom on Twitch. Thus, the more subscriptions one viewer has the more emotes are available to use.
Badges: icons which are placed next to the username in the chat. Streamers are
given the customizability of these badges and can be set differently depending on how many months the viewer is subscribed, displaying more loyalty to that streamer and thus encouraging others to subscribe.
Special Alerts: Whenever a user subscribes to a channel, the streamer often has
alerts popping up on the stream showing the subscriber’s name together with a customized thank you message. This not only gains the subscriber recognition but also helps the streamer know whenever there is a new subscriber. The subscriber can also add a custom message for the streamer to read.
Exclusive Chatroom: Twitch-affiliated streamers have the option to create a
subscriber-only chat allowing only their subscribers access that chatroom. This could be useful for those popular streamers with thousands of viewers, followers, and subscribers chatting together which would make it too cluttered and not allowing even the streamer the time to read.
Exclusive Competitions: Some Twitch streamers sometimes hold competitions
and giveaways for their subscribers, with prizes ranging from small items such as shirts and small tokens, but some streamers who are sometimes sponsored can also give away big prizes such as computer hardware, video games, or games consoles.
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Ad-Free Viewing: It is not guaranteed however some streamers also choose to
allow their subscribers to watch them without having to watch any advertisements prior to or even during the stream.
(Stephenson, 2018)
These distinguished features have been an assistance for Twitch to gain the millions of content creators it has (~2.2 million until now). On Twitch, streamers can live-stream gaming, talk shows, singing. ‘Knowing what functions Twitch offers is the foundation to understanding why people use it.’ (Dux & Kim, 2018).
2.1. Game Streaming and Twitch
As game streams are the most watched types of streams on Twitch attracting more than one million views daily (Zhang & Liu, 2015), it is essential for researchers to study this
phenomenon. The idea of video game streaming is straightforward, there is a person playing a video game, referred to as a streamer, and by choosing his or her channel, the spectator is able to watch what the streamer sees on his or her own screen. Furthermore, if a spectator creates an account with Twitch, he or she can chat with other spectators and get the chance to interact with the streamer.
“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon”, said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive in an interview in 2014 (Daily Mail, 2014). It is hard to disagree with this with Twitch getting at least 55 million more video views in 2016 than America’s premium cable satellite television network HBO (Valens, 2017).
Nowadays it has become easier to become a streamer even using game consoles like the Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox. Both Sony and Microsoft are partnered with Twitch
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enabling users to stream their gameplay through the Twitch application on their console (Graser, 2013). Before the incorporation of Twitch on Games consoles, streaming gameplay was not possible without the power of a computer. Since the origin of Twitch and its functions, it has made game streaming easier than before.
As more users are moving to Twitch, demonstrating its rise in popularity over the years, more trial partners, business makers, and researchers are becoming aware of its importance and are growing more interested in studying this live streaming platform (Kaytoue, Silva, Cerf, Meira, & Raïssi, 2012).