Seizing the craze of game audio and video live streaming, Twitch is making money in a good way

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Speaking of live audio and video, I believe everyone is familiar with it. Open Facebook or YouTube, and you can see someone doing a live broadcast at any time, with a variety of topics, ranging from book recommendations, activity sharing, game broadcasts to food introductions.

To mention this craze of video live streaming, we have to mention [Twitch] (https://www.twitch.tv/), which pioneered the trend. Twitch is an international game software audio and video streaming platform. In June 2011, it was separated from Justin.tv and launched independently. This platform not only allows players to publish live broadcasts of the game process, but also provides broadcasts of game events. In addition, a chat room is also opened so that viewers can interact simultaneously.

In addition to streaming game content, Twitch also allows live broadcasters to conduct live broadcasts on different themes such as creativity, music, and social eating. As a result, some people use the Twitch platform to share their painting process, and some people move The Scenery on the Dinner Table to the Internet.

Because of its optimism about the huge business opportunities in live video streaming, the global e-commerce giant Amazon acquired Twitch for US$970 million on August 25, 2014. At this point, Twitch has been brought under the umbrella of Amazon, which has accelerated the pace of business development.

Because it is a subsidiary of Amazon, it is not difficult to see traces of Twitch in hardware such as Kindle Fire. At the recently concluded annual TwitchCon conference, Twitch announced that viewers will be able to create and share their own audio and video clips from Twitch live streaming on iOS and Android platforms. In addition, Twitch also launched a new video editing function in mid-October 2016.

Twitch co-founder and chief operating officer Kevin Lin mentioned that mobile game live streaming is only a part of their company’s strategic layout, and the real goal is to create a ubiquitous audio and video environment so that players and users can use different mobile devices and playback devices to watch Twitch’s exciting videos and videos anytime and anywhere.

In the past, Twitch only provided game live broadcast content and past live broadcast records of live hosts in the channel. But from now on, users can also upload their own game videos to the Twitch platform. It is obvious that Twitch wants to firmly capture the attention of players, and also hopes to cultivate potential stars of tomorrow.

In addition, Twitch will also launch a new service called Twitch Prime for Amazon Prime users. These include: free subscription to a channel every month, removal of ads, free loot, discounts on newly released games, and free shipping on game release days.

At the TwitchCon conference held in 2016, they also announced the latest operating data: the average number of viewers on Twitch was 622,000, and the highest stickiness occurred in April, with a peak of 2.061 million viewers. In 2016, there were 2 million live broadcasters on the Twitch platform, including 17,000 partners. These anchors have broadcast more than 10 billion minutes of game content and are making money every day on the Twitch platform.

Taiwanese players also like Twitch very much. We can see this from the fact that Taiwan’s traffic ranks fifth in the world: there are 4.5 million unique viewers per month, and there are tens of thousands of live broadcast hosts. The monthly viewing time has also reached 800 million minutes, which is really impressive.

Among the top ten hot consumer trends in 2016 proposed by Ericsson ConsumerLab, the rise of the native generation of streaming media was mentioned. The report points out that teenagers are the group that most often watch YouTube video content. Among teenagers aged 16 to 19, 46% spend an average of more than an hour a day using YouTube. If we compare Twitch to YouTube in the gaming industry, it is not difficult to imagine how huge its future business opportunities will be.

Through the design of interactive mechanisms such as live broadcasts and chat rooms, the Twitch platform not only shortens the distance between viewers and anchors, but also allows live video broadcasts to gradually expand from the small circle of professional e-sports players to the life circle of ordinary consumers.

Kevin Lin once said: “We were born because of the community. We create a common experience and entertainment through the interaction between live hosts and fans, and successfully transform the game into a digital content industry.”

Twitch focuses on the gaming industry and establishes itself as an authoritative medium for e-sports live broadcast. They attach great importance to player participation and make good use of platform technology to create an organic ecosystem, thereby forming a strong connection between the platform, the anchor and the audience. Rather than saying that Twitch is an audio and video platform, perhaps it should be said that it is a new type of online community with live video and audio functions.

The business model of the Twitch platform is obvious. In addition to revenue from advertising, cooperation and splitting by game companies, Twitch has also designed a subscription and reward mechanism so that viewers can give back to their favorite live hosts in a substantial way. Among them, Twitch only collects part of it as platform operating expenses, and most of the income belongs to the anchor.

Twitch’s business model is very clear, but it is not difficult to understand that the operation team has more ambitious goals. They are not complacent with the current situation, and want to combine the hardware strength of parent company Amazon to conquer the living rooms of consumers’ homes in one fell swoop. Imagine that one day, when players use a large number of Amazon’s mobile devices or playback devices, coupled with Twitch’s audio and video platform, they can watch a variety of exciting audio and video content anytime, anywhere across screens and devices. Even, coupled with the e-commerce that Amazon is good at, future entertainment, leisure, shopping and business applications will all be integrated.

This is one of the reasons why Twitch is worth US$1 billion.

★ Featured image source: Twitch official website

★ Article source: This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of “English Island” magazine

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Further reading

• Make good use of AI tools to help you understand what foreign language videos are saying in seconds
• I read “Starting a Business from 0: How to Turn Experience and Knowledge into Gold”: Combining unique experience and resources to create a business with knowledge gaps
• Krenz talks about personal business model design: use the Hakka spirit to create a successful flywheel

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