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“How do we solve a problem like this?”
This was Twitch’s Kixelated on a recent afternoon, moments after the lingering crowd in SingSing’s stream page were all pleasantly startled – then quickly disappointed – by the unexpected restart of audio from the neglected tab.
Some miscreant, doubtlessly Rania the succubus Sing’s adorable girlfriend Fwoshy, had hosted a stream on Sing’s account hours after he had gone offline. Normally if you keep a tab open from a finished stream it’s because of some combination of laziness, enjoyment of the after-hours chat, and wanting to effortlessly tune-in the next time the stream comes online. When sounds start coming from the tab again, you expect the streamer to have returned, not for a channel host.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9kdvtsO.jpg)
While the Following page (linked at the top of the front page and in the expanding left side bar seen everywhere else) will show hosted channels by streamers you follow at any time, the primary intent of the host feature seems to be to hand-off a stream’s audience at the end of a broadcast. This serves multiple purposes:
- Instead of bringing viewers to a post-stream decision point to look for another broadcast or just passively stop watching Twitch, the audience is immediately watching something else. The passive option is to keep consuming.
- Twitch is provided with more behavioral and associative data to try to leverage into something actionable by themselves or broadcasters. They have already written a piece on the effects of hosting, and while some of the most important data is a bit unclear – post-host viewer behavior – it is a start.
- Finally, hosting helps drive discovery.
There are a lot of challenges if you are driving strategy at Twitch, and most of them are interrelated. How do we leverage the data we currently collect? What key metrics are we unable to assess and how do we collect for them? How do we stabilize newer partners? How do we deal with the inevitable occasion of site outages during major broadcasts? How do we and our partners further monetize? How do we improve user engagement? How do we improve our core technology: ingesting thousands of streams and spitting them out to millions of viewers? How do we grow?
Twitch is at the nexus of a huge and complex ecosystem. Everything from the whims of individual broadcasters to big strategic moves by video game developers affects them. The success or failure of tournaments and professional players, macroeconomics, data infrastructure, even global politics: all of these things have an impact. And they still have to worry about whether DansGame is anti-aliased in Theater Mode (it’s not). The breadth of their interest is reflected on their jobs page. The depth is probably best understood by talking to their engineers. But I’m going to talk about some of it here.
Autoplay killed the video star
The core issue driving the problem Kixelated was pondering is the fact that all Twitch video players are on auto-play. There’s no technology more core to Twitch than their video players, and engineers have been working on a new, HTML5-driven player for a long time. No doubt many new features will be implemented within the video frame once this is in place, but in the meantime the binary nature of broadcasts is problematic.
Until a video frame is paused, it basically has two states: on and off. Broadcasts just “end” currently. A user unplugging their PC or being strafed by A-10 fire is indistinguishable from them signing-off verbally and ending the broadcast. As such, little information is provided to either Twitch or the end user regarding the end of the broadcast. Corner a Twitch data scientist (as creepily as possible) and ask them if they’d like to be able to easily distinguish among the following types of stream terminations:
- User sent an “end broadcast” signal to Twitch
- Unexplained interruption of ingest
- Regional internet outage
- User sent a “restart broadcast” signal to Twitch
- User sent an “end broadcast into host channel” signal to Twitch
- Twitch went boo-boo
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wK83cJR.png) Or there's always the status quo.
Of far greater value in totality than the refined data this would offer are the numerous user experience implications in distinguishing among these. But that ability doesn’t exist yet, so in the meantime, every terminated stream acts the same and every freshly booted video player acts as though there is no broadcast until it connects and blurts at you as soon as it is able.
The latter discourages some types of desirable user behavior. The one already covered is the act of simply leaving a tab open when you aren’t watching a broadcast. Having a tab randomly start to play video is one of the biggest red cards in UX on the internet. But it also discourages the use of some of Twitch’s discovery band-aids.
Discovery is more than a fallen cable channel
One of the greatest challenges by vendors and content providers on the internet is connecting people to what they want. Think of every super-specific category you’ve ever seen as a Netflix user (Visually striking critically acclaimed gritty foreign films? *CLICK*), Amazon’s ubiquitous purchase recommendations, and Twitter’s recommended follows. The case for Amazon is quite obvious: they want you to buy more stuff, so they show you more stuff they think you might want to buy. You pay a flat rate for streaming Netflix and nothing for Twitter, while both services pay more the more you use them. But Netflix wants you to find them indispensable, and Twitter wants you staying in the network and contributing, so they both work very hard at the same problem.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/uvJLtim.png) I have two Twitter accounts I use on a daily basis. The recommendations I get are specific to how I use the accounts.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iruYFkH.jpg)
I haven’t bought a mousepad in a very long time but I do need one: I keep running my mouse off the pad during heated Dota battles. How did they know!?
Twitch’s motivations for good discovery are an amalgam of these three companies. Like Netflix they have monthly subscribers to the network, but there is a significant variable cost associated with increased use. Like Amazon, a small percentage of successful recommendations will lead to a purchase – individual channel subscriptions. Like Twitter, their content is user-generated, and successfully connecting users to the content they want to see keeps people creating content. Unlike any of these services, Twitch’s discovery system is quite primitive.
They have visibly been trying to work this problem. There is a reason there are several featured streams on the front page. There is a reason they have their Partner Spotlight program. There is a reason that, if you expand your sidebar while at a channel there are a handful of suggested channels associated with the one you’re watching. Broadcaster teams have been around for as long as I’ve been a serious Twitch user.
But all of these band-aids currently pale in comparison to the site shouting at you almost everywhere you go: here’s what the most people are watching. I’ve been to Sodapoppin’s stream. It’s not my cup of tea. Telling me he’s one of the top six streamers right now does nothing for me. I can’t bring myself to enjoy League of Legends even when a streamer I like is playing it. Regardless of what’s hot right now I’d rather stab myself in the eyeballs than watch nearly anyone playing nearly any MMO – I can just close my eyes and remember my five years being the GMMT of a WoW raiding guild if I want to bore myself to death.
Showing people what’s popular definitely has its place. That place is not overwhelming primacy. Twitch seems to know this on some level; the front page leads with hand-selected channels after all. But after that it basically falls apart. Only one page shows channels hosted by streamers you follow. Only one area of the UI – usually hidden – provides you with recommendations, and these are only those channels popularly associated with the one you’re watching. They’re not tailored for you at all. Only CS:GO has sub-sorting mechanisms. Everywhere else, everything is sorted by popularity.
Again, Twitch knows this is a problem. How big a problem they see it as is a mystery. As is how they intend to work the problem.
Bro, do you even ideate solutions?
There tend to be two major constituencies regarding problems like this at tech companies.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Sk8LhiG.jpg) Leveraging the dynamics of social networking will obviate crude solutioneering, as digital human
interaction organically drives discovery, from the most mainstream content consumption to the longest
of long-tail use-case scenarios.
Social is indeed part of the solution set to such problems but many companies have tried and expensively failed to force social into their platforms where it doesn’t naturally belong. Twitch may successfully evolve into a social platform, which has its advantages. It can also do a lot to improve its interactions with the vital external social networks. However, the former is a long road if it is going to be successful, and the latter will only ever drive a small percentage of discovery.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Vilpk1g.jpg) Our sick algorithm will tell us everything we need to know about what people want to watch.
More data = more accurate. Step aside, social. This is the age of Big Data.
Of course algorithmic recommendations are a great tool. They’re also greatly enhanced by social networks thanks to the additional layer of associations they provide. Twitch already has made some progress on this but as a daily user I only discovered the obscure location of recommendations in the last week, literally while scouring the website for any features I hadn’t seen.
While both of these lines of effort have merit, the primary solution is quite simple, and synergizes with both social propagation and algorithmic discovery.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wFWirxc.jpg) What if – and I’m just spitballing here – we empowered users to
find for themselves the content they are interested in?
It’s not sexy. It’s not social. It’s not algorithmic. But it’s another thing Amazon gets brilliantly right: the most important tool to give users is the ability to drill down for themselves. This isn’t something easily accomplished by Netflix as you can only get so specific about shows before you run out of meaningful options. Twitter users are even harder to categorize but Twitter is a platform built on user-driven propagation and provides loads of data that can be used to create recommendation algorithms.
Twitch broadcasters can be hard to categorize. That’s where social and algorithmic discovery engines have their role. Broadcasts, on the other hand, have a lot of useful details. Details Twitch isn’t using. It’s time to change that.
(Note: Please see the fantastic Welcome to BusinessTown Tumblr for more of the above three images)
Everybody wants to be a category
Currently, the normal process for finding a broadcast is to go to a game’s directory. Alternatively you can tune in by name to a streamer, one you follow, or one linked on social media or elsewhere. You might use a group page but based on the neglected-looking interface I think that is quite uncommon. I’ve read about language selectors but have never seen one in the wild. CS:GO is the one game I’m aware of where there is sub-sorting within a game page: categorically by map, and by viewers or rank (which is then sub-sorted by viewers). PS4 and Xbone streamers can be viewed by platform.
And that’s it. And to this I say: metadata? More like mehtadata.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4sUfRjm.jpg)
Let’s talk about how it should be. The first order of business is being able to browse broadcast types categorically. Here’s an example of how you could break this down:
- Competitive: Twitch and competitive gaming have a mutually vital relationship. While Twitch has helped create a new kind of professional gamer in general, they have also been instrumental in ushering a new age in competitive gaming. Their passion for esports is clear and backed by real money. They are even hiring a director to build a team focused on tournament organization partners . But there’s a cheaper, simpler, and arguably more important thing Twitch can do to help: give competitive broadcasts a directory. If the biggest tournament running is in World of Tanks with 300 viewers, anyone who loves esports should be able to see it simply by dropping in on the Competitive directory to see what’s shaking.
- Speed Running: absurd numbers of people tune in to AGDQ twice a year and raise crazy money for baby cancer or whatever. And Twitch have been great partners to them, making sure to spotlight them on the front page and promote them in social media. I quite enjoy watching AGDQ but I couldn’t name a single speedrunner. The utility of this category is self-evident.
- Talk Shows: broadcasters who run talk shows on Twitch currently have two options: list themselves in the Talk Show directory or, if they are focused on a single game, possibly list themselves in that directory for better exposure. The way you maximize exposure for such content is to give them the capability to be listed in both.
- Creative: this currently functions like Talk Shows. LiveWorkshop, as a standout example, has the most extreme production value to viewer count ratio on Twitch. Manny and Anuxinamoon do incredible work and have very enjoyable streams. It's too bad no one who doesn't browse the Dota2 directory will ever find them. And if they sign off you aren't breadcrumbed to the unofficial "Creative" directory. They are in a group called Game Artists which has the advantage of being curated by professionals but the disadvantage of no one using group pages.
- Charity: with the caveat that being listed in this category should require pre-approval from Twitch, this seems like the natural next step in the way Twitch supports charity streams, and it would make it easier for smaller ones to get noticed.
- Professional: professional competitive gamers drive a huge percentage of Twitch’s viewership even when they aren’t officially competing. The biggest argument against a category like this is how it would be administrated. There’s a pretty clear case for Twitch to have a Verified system like Twitter or – relatedly – Dotabuff, but who gets to list themselves as a professional and who doesn’t is a bit more complicated. Still, it is worth considering.
- Game Studio: I don’t know how often studios smaller than, say, Nintendo or Epic have streams but there’s a clear audience interest in such streams and making it easier for them to be found will certainly encourage more of them to take place.
As obvious as this seems, nothing is accomplished simply by adding these directories. They have to be meaningful implemented into the website. A film strip element on the front page directly underneath the featured streams section is a good first step. Show the directories with active listings and the viewer count. Are there 30,000 people watching Competitive? Maybe you should take a look.
The front page has two purposes: it acts as a new user's first experience with the site, and it acts as the primary launching point for finding content. An Explore page focused on the latter would be redundant with the current state of Twitch, but that itself is enough proof of the need for these changes.
It's elective! It's elective...
The above categories all have one thing in common: while not every category is available to every user, they are self-selected. They also leave out the greatest bulk of streams (though they capture the overwhelming bulk of viewers). A very smart boss I once had told me the easier you make it for people to do the right thing, the more likely they are to do it. Electing a category is quite easy, and the way the provided examples are arranged, most users will seldom change theirs.
But, while much would be accomplished with categories alone, far more can be done with a deeper approach. Let users drill down.
First up is the fairly situational application of the CS:GO approach. It isn't right for most games but where it applies it can be a great tool. This would give you the ability to subsort a game directory by factors such as:
- Map / Mode
- Ranking
- Solo / Group queue
- ????
The problem is that in order to not create a headache for Twitch admins and streamers alike, this needs to be done via API, the way it is with CS:GO. (Disclosure: my SO works for an API firm). Let's pretend for a minute that Blizzard aren't API-hating assholes. A WoW stream could be sorted by queue/zone type, and subsorted again. Battlegrounds? Arenas? What kind of arenas? RBGs? Raids? What size raid? What zone? PVP rating? Class? Dota2 and LoL have fewer meaningful options but can still be sorted this way.
I don't know if Twitch has a developer liaison evangelizing the merits of creating Twitch-friendly APIs and interfaces (do you have a safe corner for a camera?) but if they don't they really need to hire one. The case is fairly easy to make for taking streaming into consideration if you're a developer and if you're Twitch you have a lot of input to give.
So far, the above methods of categorization are all limited to one data point per category. This is simpler and better for macrocategorization and the only option for microcategorization (what we just went over). The final step is to add tags, but these, again, are not selected by the user. They're selected by the game and administered by Twitch.
The primary tag type would be genre - and you would use tags here because many games cross genres and let's not make this too hard on ourselves.
- MOBA
- RTS
- FPS
- MMORPG
- Fighting Game
- Puzzle
- Strategy
- RPG
- Card (online)
- Card, Board, Tabletop, and PnP but like IRL idk -_-? (I really don't know what to call this but it really needs some love)
- Mobile (this is coming eventually, right?)
- ETCETERA
Another tag to associate with a game would be the publisher(s). And as you go to the directory of each of these you are once again shown the film strip at the top displaying the top games in that directory by viewers, and then the usual array of broadcasts in that directory from every game, sorted by rank. While search by publisher is niche enough not to warrant a spot on the front page, top genres does. Obviously MOBAs will be the top genre the vast majority of the time and battle lines have long been drawn over who loves which, but most genres aren't so violently territorial. Encouraging people to browse a genre will likely lead to them finding content they want.
The End of the Line
As I put the finishing touches on this post, YouTube has announced their entrance into the game streaming market. Twitch's first-mover advantage is huge, but not insurmountable. So before concluding it's important to note that most people already search for VODs on YouTube. From Twitch's standpoint this might be OK - YouTube pays for streaming that Twitch might be doing at a loss. But it also points to the fact that VODs need work. There's not a reasonable world in which Twitch's video browsing is expected to be as polished as YouTube's, but Twitch has the advantage of specialization. Apply the above logic to VODs and add the ability for users to add free-form tags.
I was watching Hafu last year when SUDDENLY, a WILD METEOS APPEAR. I don't watch LoL so I didn't understand all the nerdgasming in chat. I just searched for a VOD of that on Twitch. Guess how much luck I had? Now, Hafu and whoever is working with her, have now, and will always have, responsibility for how well-curated their VODs are. But assuming they do an even remotely good job, finding something like that should be extremely easy. Assuming they're given the tools.
And giving users tools is what this post is all about. I'd love to talk about basic user friction, and the limitations of monetization for streamers, and the outsider's perspective of how limited the options for data analysis must be at Twitch, and possibly try to talk them out of the idea that monochromatic superflat is a good design language on 27" monitors. But the most important thing for Twitch to do at this juncture is give users the power to find the content they want to see, and give broadcasters more power to be found. Because as popular as the top .1% of streamers are, for the average user, when their favorite streamers are offline there's almost always something they'd enjoy watching more if only they could find it. That keeps them watching, and keeps the discovered streamers streaming. And in the end, that's what we want.
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I tried to read it. I really did. But you lost me when you started talking about tabs and sing sing and shit at the beginning. I didn't realize people left offline streams open all day. That's real weird.
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On June 13 2015 10:46 Ayaz2810 wrote:
I tried to read it. I really did. But you lost me when you started talking about tabs and sing sing and shit at the beginning. I didn't realize people left offline streams open all day. That's real weird.
Closing the tab is the active option after a stream ends, meaning leaving it open is the passive default. Many people including myself will have a stream running while we do many things and it won't even be in the foreground some times. Also - and I went into this in further detail on the first pass but decided it was actually way too irrelevant for such a detailed discussion - you might pause a stream and forget about it. The exact same thing happens when hosting starts. In addition, many people hang around after broadcasts end to chat. Once the spammers clear out major channels tend to have what resembles a more normal chat room.
In any case, while anyone is welcome to read it and comment, it's a 3k+ word post on a specific aspect of Twitch. You have to make some audience choices, and having a short opening narrative some people might not get through seemed like a reasonable gamble.
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Headline and intro don't fit, intro has no relation to the main body of text, the pictures are tangentially related at best and I still don't know what your problem is. Sorry man, but that's just poorly structured.
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On June 13 2015 11:16 Dagobert wrote:
Headline and intro don't fit, intro has no relation to the main body of text, the pictures are tangentially related at best and I still don't know what your problem is. Sorry man, but that's just poorly structured.
What is it you think the headline is about?
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I haven't got the slightest idea. One way you can avoid this (other than choosing informative headlines) is by picking up on the terms you use. Example:
Twitch and the long tail
Doesn't it bother you when X happens? I call that the "long tail" of Twitch.
Simple. I suspect "long-tail" is a buzzword, but I can't be sure, because you never use it in the actual text. I would expect a term you present in a headline to actually show up in the text.
Let's look at the other sub-headers:
“How do we solve a problem like this?”
Autoplay killed the video star
Discovery is more than a fallen cable channel
Bro, do you even ideate solutions?
Everybody wants to be a category
It's elective! It's elective...
The End of the Line
What story are you trying to tell?
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There's no tl;dr for this, I'm sorry. The target audience is those who have a serious interest in the subject.
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It's not about TLDR, it's about getting your point across. If you think only a chosen few will understand your sophisticated and wittily written market analysis, then good luck with that attitude. May there be plenty who can actually make sense of what you're trying to communicate. And may their interest be nothing but serious.
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On June 13 2015 12:08 Dagobert wrote:
It's not about TLDR, it's about getting your point across. If you think only a chosen few will understand your sophisticated and wittily written market analysis, then good luck with that attitude. May there be plenty who can actually make sense of what you're trying to communicate. And may their interest be nothing but serious.
There's no need to get upset.
Every time you write something you have to consider your objectives and who you are writing for. As I said before, I didn't write over 3,000 words on a relatively narrow subject within Twitch.tv with the idea that it was going to have mass appeal. Feedback on that front would be better put to use on a post without so obviously a divergent purpose.
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i mean it's obvious the general theme is "how to improve the twitch browsing interface" but your writing is like worse than envy-level in terms of cohesiveness
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wait I loved this why is the reception so negative wtf
5/5 I want to spotlight it
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So where's the Girl-Gamer category? /sarcasm
I really liked your approach. For me, finding new streams to watch is nearly wholly dependent on recommendations from Streams I already watch, but a better way to sort/categorize streams would be great.
And Twitch's VOD system truly is abominable, which isn't helped by Broadcasters/tournaments leaving uncut 12h VODs with wrong stream titles as the only way to watch a match that concluded 30 mins ago.
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I just want to know what happened with sing's girlfriend on his stream..
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I think the bottom 2/3rd's of this blog is fantastic. I'm sure a lot of people are going to get bogged down in that first little singsing bit taht is a little convuted and akward, and just not continue reading. There's a lot of very solid points and some great ideas on how Twitch can continue to compete as Youtube joins the streaming world for real. Well thought out and wel written.
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"Some miscreant, doubtlessly Rania the succubus Sing’s adorable girlfriend Fwoshy, had hosted a stream on Sing’s account hours after he had gone offline."
That's like the only line I read out of the whole blog tbh.
5/5 for Kripparrino though
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Thanks guys and thanks for the spotlight. There's a lot more I'd like to cover in continuing posts (and some I probably will) that was touched on here. I had a Word doc open with this post for about ten days before I decided to finish it up and of course I posted it on the same day there were two major announcements from Twitch competition.
And yeah, I had to throw in some silly references for the hardcore twictcherati. Twitch is many things, and a culture is one of them.
In a more autobiographical addendum I went drinking with a Russian expat last night and was up long enough to see Dendi play some Pudge but that was about it for my day. Getting old is bad and I do not recommend it.
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Love the insight, but presentation needs some work. For one thing every portion is good by itself, but together as a text walll seems very confusing and disjoint. I think this mainly lies in the title of the blog as well as the beginning. I honestly did not know what I was reading until the profit models of other companies.
The graphics as weell do not relate well enough with the content presented, I would almost suggest ignoring them.
Looking forwardnto another blog
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The title is a reference to the idea covered in this book which has gotten a lot of traction with the advent of things like Kickstarter and Etsy. The basic idea is that we have come to a point where we can service people with very specific tastes and it is more successful than trying to get everyone to like the same things.
I spent a long time trying to think of a short, catchy title and that one made sense once I decided what the focus was going to be. FTR I haven't actually read that book, it's a concept I've seen in many places but I do understand that it's a reference with a more narrow constituency.
Oh, and the graphics were actually not needed at all, I basically just used them to visually break up the post a bit and hopefully provide a little humor.
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Seems silly to use the word "long tail" which actually has relevance and meaning for Twitch streams and viewership, and have an entire post that has nothing to do with it.
The long tail is all the cumulative views that come after the initial live stream spike, which could potentially total up to far more viewer-hours than the live stream itself.
Which actually would would a legitimate topic as well, about how Streamers and Twitch could do a better job of promoting highlight moments for viewers to dig through, instead of relying on random linking from outside sources.
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??
That may be one usage of the term I've never heard of (though it refers to the same visual effect in a histogram) but if anything my usage is far more mainstream.
I'd really love to dive into Twitch data related to viewership patterns but the problem is I don't know what it looks like from their end or from the end of a high-end streamer. They have written the occasional blog post about it but it doesn't reveal a whole lot. That said there are some assumptions one could make that are reasonable to explore.
Also your signature is incorrect.
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Disclaimer: I almost never sound so bitter in posts and write stuff simply bashing a subject, but Twitch is a complete train wreck, so bear with me.
Twitch's front page looks like a reminiscent of a 2002 e-commerce website listing "top-X most sold" under irrelevant (to me) sections and the whole navigation/discovery is incredibly awful. Searching is useless. Did you see the search results page? Oh my fucking god.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EWX27Es.png)
There's a long column of useless results and awful red icons indicating people are live... floating around a sea of white pixels. That pretty much sets the mood when navigating Twitch: you have to discover islands of land after swimming a sea of nothingness.
I intuitively developed a revulsion for Twitch's first page when it auto-played stuff. I was not even aware that I was doing it, but reading you post I remembered that I do a conscious effort to try and remember actual channel URLs so I go directly to the channels, completely avoiding the front page. Now I use a Google Chrome extension that notifies me about streams and I don't even care to open twitch website anymore.
The UI is astonishingly bad. There's a complete lack of appeal. There's nothing more innocuous than a showing a 6 columns by infinite rows table of boxes displaying the latest snapshot of a streaming session:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3aRSUZv.jpg)
You get snapshots of people configuring stuff in windows, snapshots of people browsing websites. I'm not going to click any of this shit.
Even freaking gosugamers get it a little bit better:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AGMIMbk.png)
There is at least some visual appeal to check a stream.
For me as a spectator Twitch is good at one, and only one thing: that frame where the video plays. Their backend and infrastructure is the only good thing. Everything else seems to be stuff thrown around to fill space.
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Yeah, I ONLY go to Twitch from the starting point of the Dota2 directory. Two reasons:
1) Dodges the autoplay video on the front page
2) Actually shows me who is live among followed channels.
How the latter is only on directory pages baffles me.
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On June 14 2015 16:02 FHDH wrote:
??
That may be one usage of the term I've never heard of (though it refers to the same visual effect in a histogram) but if anything my usage is far more mainstream.
I'd really love to dive into Twitch data related to viewership patterns but the problem is I don't know what it looks like from their end or from the end of a high-end streamer. They have written the occasional blog post about it but it doesn't reveal a whole lot. That said there are some assumptions one could make that are reasonable to explore.
Also your signature is incorrect.
The long tail in market and commerce refers to the "tail" of the inverse exponential graph, meaning the total sales that comes after the peak from initial sales, and how it can stretch out over years and years, making it extremely "long". In fact, that's exactly what the book you linked to is all about: focusing on the long tail for profits instead of counting on the big initial peak from early demand.
There are probably several other aspects of Twitch that are relevant to the term long tail, but live viewership and VoD seems the most relevant.
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Fair enough, I think consumer preferences is the most relevant but it seems like a silly argument; they are both valid.
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Maybe Twitch can re-pivot to only sell infrastructure, turning into "streaming as a service". Being bought by Amazon reinforces that notion. Because they are falling behind the community and content discovery aspects very, very quickly. Youtube can and probably will outpace them on those fronts very easily.
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On June 14 2015 18:15 populis wrote:
Maybe Twitch can re-pivot to only sell infrastructure, turning into "streaming as a service". Being bought by Amazon reinforces that notion. Because they are falling behind the community and content discovery aspects very, very quickly. Youtube can and probably will outpace them on those fronts very easily. Not really. Twitch is, and has always been since it was spun off from justin.tv, about building a recognizable brand in the gaming market to attract both streamers and viewers to their service. They are all over the place with partnerships, sponsoring teams, tournaments, having their own convention... That's what Amazon bought : a gigantic (and growing) audience of gamers that associate "live game streaming" with "twitch".
Besides, Amazon never needed Twitch for the streaming technology in the first place. They have been the streaming technology behind Netflix for more than 5 years (here is a blogpost from a Netflix architect explaining why they chose to abandon their own streaming technology in favor of Amazon).
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On June 14 2015 21:06 retr0x wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2015 18:15 populis wrote:
Maybe Twitch can re-pivot to only sell infrastructure, turning into "streaming as a service". Being bought by Amazon reinforces that notion. Because they are falling behind the community and content discovery aspects very, very quickly. Youtube can and probably will outpace them on those fronts very easily. Not really. Twitch is, and has always been since it was spun off from justin.tv, about building a recognizable brand in the gaming market to attract both streamers and viewers to their service. They are all over the place with partnerships, sponsoring teams, tournaments, having their own convention... That's what Amazon bought : a gigantic (and growing) audience of gamers that associate "live game streaming" with "twitch". Besides, Amazon never needed Twitch for the streaming technology in the first place. They have been the streaming technology behind Netflix for more than 5 years (here is a blogpost from a Netflix architect explaining why they chose to abandon their own streaming technology in favor of Amazon).
What Amazon AWS offers is the barebones infrastructure (raw servers and raw bandwidth), they don't offer out of the box streaming. Netflix implements their streaming on top of that infrastructure. Twitch probably does the same, using the very same infrastructure (AWS). Streaming is a very complex technology, specially on the scale of Twitch or Netflix, so Twitch could indeed sell that as a service.
Yes, I agree that Twitch went to great lengths to build up their user base. That's generally the first rule of a growing startup that wants to scale. But there's two ways of approaching that problem, given the nature of the Twitch's business: organically grow by being attractive to content creators (single streamers, casting studios, etc), offering the maximum features and polishing the user experience; and "infiltrating" the market by making contracts, partnerships and deals with big content providers.
Both approaches are not mutually exclusive, but when scaling, a company simply doesn't have resources to invest heavily on both. They must choose.
Twitch adopted the latter. Youtube grew (long before Google) by adopting the former. Both approaches resulted in very distinct products.
So Twitch didn't invest in building their product, they invested in building their service (mostly to companies, not individual streamers) and now are ages behind in developing their product to end users.
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Twitch doesn't run on AWS (they switched off of it years ago) and netflix doesn't stream from ec2 boxes they stream from cdns and use ec2 and s3 for video processing.
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On June 13 2015 12:15 FHDH wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2015 12:08 Dagobert wrote:
It's not about TLDR, it's about getting your point across. If you think only a chosen few will understand your sophisticated and wittily written market analysis, then good luck with that attitude. May there be plenty who can actually make sense of what you're trying to communicate. And may their interest be nothing but serious. There's no need to get upset. Every time you write something you have to consider your objectives and who you are writing for. As I said before, I didn't write over 3,000 words on a relatively narrow subject within Twitch.tv with the idea that it was going to have mass appeal. Feedback on that front would be better put to use on a post without so obviously a divergent purpose.
Ideally, the intro would be engaging enough that it makes people interested in what you have to say.
Currently, even people who are interested in the topic may not read the piece because they can't make sense of it.
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On June 15 2015 11:56 Slithe wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2015 12:15 FHDH wrote:On June 13 2015 12:08 Dagobert wrote:
It's not about TLDR, it's about getting your point across. If you think only a chosen few will understand your sophisticated and wittily written market analysis, then good luck with that attitude. May there be plenty who can actually make sense of what you're trying to communicate. And may their interest be nothing but serious. There's no need to get upset. Every time you write something you have to consider your objectives and who you are writing for. As I said before, I didn't write over 3,000 words on a relatively narrow subject within Twitch.tv with the idea that it was going to have mass appeal. Feedback on that front would be better put to use on a post without so obviously a divergent purpose. Ideally, the intro would be engaging enough that it makes people interested in what you have to say. Currently, even people who are interested in the topic may not read the piece because they can't make sense of it.
When, on Octover 1999, Shaykh Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani died at the venerable age of 85, virtually everyone int he world of Salafi Islam was in mourning. In the eyes of many, he was the third great contemporary figure of Salafism, after 'Abd al-'Aziz b. Baz, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, deceased a few months earlier, and his second-in-command within the Saudi religious establishment, Muhammad b. 'Uthaymin. Salafi newspapers, magazines, and websites celebrated the memory of this son of an Albanian watchmaker who had become the "traditionist of the era" (muhaddith al-'asr), recognized by all as the greatest hadith scholar of his generation.
This is the introduction of a two-chapter book that is really interesting to me, but I rarely recommend to anyone. It explores the ideological foundations of an extremist group that in 1979 seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. To some people I will recommend The Siege of Mecca which is about those events more narrowly and reads like a Tom Clancy novel. But you have to be really interested in the subject to read The Meccan Rebellion which is co-authored by Dr. Thomas Hegghammer, to whom I was introduced when I read his doctoral thesis, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, an even more academic text about something a lot of people think they care about but definitely don't care enough about to read that book.
Now I have to ask you: are you interested in reading more based on that introductory paragraph I quoted? You might be someone with a deep enough interest to wade through the rest. I bet most people who read that would go "zzzzz" and walk away. That's probably the appropriate response.
My writing isn't here - and is never - beyond reproach. There's a logic to the path to the main body, which doesn't mean it isn't flawed or sub-optimal. But the idea that, flatly, you want an introduction to make readers interested in the subject, is simply untrue. Whether you're writing for 8th grade English or your college Critical Thinking class or Anthropology or for your Master's course, or your military commander, you have a target audience, and those audiences vary by quite a lot. You will write appropriately for them.
Sometimes, you have to make the assumption that reading your piece and finding it worthwhile requires a level of interest in the subject that is about yay-high. If you write your introduction for a much broader audience you might draw people in who will completely lose interest in the subject, and you might immediately lose the people who are naturally inclined to be interested in your subject. And there is no way to bridge that gap. Hardcore, Nature-subscribing scientists might read Popular Science but they either skip pieces about their own fields or yell about how bad they are. Such is the nature of things.
Good writing typically requires good editing. Good editing takes time. I'd given this piece multiple major passes (including my typical I've written 800 words time to erase it and start over process), but past a point it's just not a reasonable investment. Now, I get that a number of people don't like the flow of the post. No doubt it could use work. But if you come to me and say "the title didn't make sense, the introduction didn't make sense, and I don't understand what the point of the piece is," as one poster did, how seriously can I take that feedback? Even if people didn't like some of the writing nearly everyone seemed to get the point. And there is a logic to how it was honed into, even if the execution needed work or the logic wasn't entirely sound in practice.
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Northern Ireland22208 Posts
i got lost by the third part
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I got the article and enjoyed it, but it does have quite a few flaws.
I dont care if there is some kind of interesting aneccdote for the hook but I would have like the objective statement to show up earlier so I know what i am in for.
There is certainly a TLDR for the article too, but again there is a bit of lacking in organziaton so Im not going to bother to do it incase I miss something. That requires alot of proof and peer reading though and for something casual like this maybe not neccessary.
That having been said it will be quite off putting even for people interested in the subject because some of them may not know what you are trying to talk about. If you believe that the vagueness you started off will hook people with knowledge ; well Im sorry but I find that unlikely. I literally gave it another chance because I was on a flight back home and my wifi on the plane ran out with the page loaded.
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Maybe not. All I'm saying is there is no universal hook.
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On June 18 2015 08:55 FHDH wrote:
Maybe not. All I'm saying is there is no universal hook.
You dont need a universal hook and no one said you should have one. Just be very clear and simple in what you want to talk about. Since you know your target audience, that should be easy. You dont need a 200 word intro either. Just identify what you want to explore and then lay it out.
And with that way off starting off you will at the very least get someone to read it, if they arent interested they will stop. Ok fine. But there is no demerit to this whereas what you have now is needlessly risky.
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On June 20 2015 05:16 populis wrote:FHDH, did you read Ars Technica's Hands-on with YouTube Gaming? Looks like Twitch's got a run for their money.
I hadn't seen it, thanks. Looks pretty serious. All the branching that goes on from a game's page is so necessary. There's a lot of very useful stuff Twitch can do in that area. I've long thought they should develop and maintain glossaries for their competitive games so if you're trying to watch something you're not an expert in you can easily look up a term broadcasters use without leaving the page.
This should definitely light a fire under Twitch's ass. I mean, they have a huge challenge with their core technology that YouTube has far behind them: capacity engineering. They are simultaneously trying to upgrade their video player to HTML5 and ensure that outages such as what happened during E3 just don't happen. But it definitely feels like, while this is a pretty legitimate focus, UX has gotten far shorter shrift than is necessary by any means.
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Speaking of doing a better job with existing social platforms
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I don't know if Twitch has a developer liaison evangelizing the merits of creating Twitch-friendly APIs and interfaces (do you have a safe corner for a camera?) but if they don't they really need to hire one. The case is fairly easy to make for taking streaming into consideration if you're a developer and if you're Twitch you have a lot of input to give.
Oh hey look at this new job posting.
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And suddenly Creative is an official category. Doesn't solve the larger problem, but at least it isn't generic anymore.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/znH9Gkw.jpg)
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EPT
