EPTI was hoping this article would be a light in a dark tunnel for a streamer trying to make a breakthrough. I was slightly disappointed, but not surprised, that they did not reveal what this means for the streamers.
I was on the other hand quite surprised that they focused their article on "deeply integrated custom packages". I've worked as a webdeveloper for a media-house here in Norway and the best move we ever made was to have a sales team selling ads which are highly relevant to our readers. Our website was focused on technology and diapers and tampons are not going to give us a good click rate.
A lot of the commercials on twitch are of absolutely no interest to me. If you want to stop people from adblocking you have to advertise something of interest. For instance - all starcraft streams would love to have advertisements related to gaming equipment, computer hardware, etc etc. With 35 million UNIQUE viewers the companies should be lining up to advertise directly to their focusgroup.
Twitch has the "Turbo" subscription which removes ads. This should have been a great product, but instead I feel it is more a nag-remover. Because the advertisements running these days are nagging me out of my mind. I don't use adblock, but I am tempted to. Turbo is not a subscription that appeals to me at all.
It is very vague what they mean by "deeply integrated custom packages" and it may turn out to be something that we all appreciate, but that remains to be seen. I think most of us are not fond of advertisements, but we suffer them (at least within e-sports) in order to support our streamers.
I would like to touch on another subject directly related to the streamers themselves:
Twitch partnership involves: Transcoding (ability to switch quality), monetizing videos through ads and subscriptions, team streams (a wrapper for several streams).
I've applied several times through GGWP.TV to become a partner at Twitch. They have denied every time and their reason is that transcoding is highly resource intensive and they can only afford to give that ability to the streams with the high volume. We are by no means a stream with high volume, but we travel around in Norway doing most of the big events here. When we are doing the Norwegian Championship with 4-500 viewers and people are asking why they can't switch quality (usually because of lag) my initial feeling is failure as a streamer. Not rising up to the golden trophy of Twitch Partnership.
There's really no point in splitting the partnership up into several products. Either you have enough volume and is capable of earning money of it or you aren't. But I would appreciate that they make more features for us. Like for instance make the "team" stream wrapper available to all. GGWP.TV has streams for both my co-caster and me as well as our main stream.
They should also improve multi-admin support. To have full access to my streams dashboard I need to log out of my personal account and into the ggwp.tv account. This is two weeks of work - tops.
What about integrating a calendar (google?) so can set up a schedule? Shouldn't be that hard especially if you only require write and read access to a google calendar. The google api is awesome.
I think I am just a little bitter that we never seem to get anywhere with our stream. It would be nice if Twitch gave us wee people some thought and love. How about an upvote system? See if you can get your stream to "trend" on Twitch?
In the end I think that the internal sales team won't matter as much to me as a streamer. It might matter for Catz or Idra (which is great), but that doesn't help me much. At least it is somewhat likely that the ads will be better. Tampons and starcraft doesn't go well together.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/twitch-in-house-sales-team/
