Twitch – What capabilities it offers and to whom?
About the existence of Twitch.TV users do not have to be convinced. Rather, most people in contact with the world of social media at least once in his life heard this name. But what the name is associated with? Well, there is a conviction that Twitch is a smaller equivalent of Youtube and yes, there is something in it, but not really, because the idea of the service is a little different. What is the platform, what is it used for and what achievements it has in Poland?
What is Twitch?
This is the name of a well-known website. Twitch is a multimedia platform that allows you to share live broadcasts. The main purpose of this platform is the streaming of computer games and related e-sports competitions, which have recently increased in importance. By many Internet users are treated as equal to the traditional sports games. This is evidenced by events such as IEM. Intel Extreme Masters is one of the biggest e-sports events in the world and without a doubt the most important in the country. It is organized in Katowice Spodek, and in February will be organized again after a two-year break. Going back to Twitch its popularity has started to grow along with the popularity of online gaming. Probably everyone at least once heard such names as League of Legends or Counter Strike, and which were willingly broadcast on twitch. The service's website has been around for 10 years, and was bought out by Jeff Bezos for $970 million 7 years ago.
Twitch in numbers – users
According to the Affde article.com from July b.r. the service was visited by 140 million unique users per month. Compared to data from 6 years ago, the number has increased by 95 million users. The United States has the largest share of Twitch viewers, at about 25 percent. of all. Only 35 percent. users are female, the rest are male. Only 27 percent. people who use the portal are more than 35 years old. The application serviced by the name Twitch has been downloaded already over 100 million times.
Twitch in numbers – earnings
The aforementioned League of Legends, fondly referred to as LOL is the most watched title on Twitch, with game streams resulting in nearly 36 billion hours of viewing, which for the sake of trivia, let's just say that's over 4 million years! Affde points to Twitch's annual revenue of $1.54 billion.
On average, more than 2 million people are live-streaming at any given time, and the average number of simultaneous broadcast channels per week is 94,323.
The most popular transmissions are on Sundays, and the least popular on Mondays.
Twitch's app is officially available on platforms: Android, iOS, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Nvidia Shield and Amazon Fire TV.
Wikipedians also tell us which graphics chips the site is integrated with. These are mi in. Origin and Uplay. The functions of the drivers for Nvidia and AMD Radeon graphics cards (ShadowPlay and ReLive) also enable broadcasting.
How to create an account on Twitch?
The process is no more complicated than most platforms of this kind. After typing the phrase Twitch in the search engine.tv you will be redirected to a page that looks like the screenshot below.
In the upper right corner you click the button that redirects you to the login or registration window.
If you do not have an account, you will need to register, so select the appropriate option.
As standard, you need to come up with a nickname, specify a password – which Twitch is very rigorous, so be prepared for really difficult passwords. Then you have to choose your birthday to verify the possibility of using the service and then you have to specify how you want to verify your account.
An account without proper verification cannot be considered active and will not work, certainly not fully. To verify your account, we have two ways: email and text message. A matter of preference or situation. Then enter the verification code and you will get this notification.
Next, we choose our preferences so that the algorithm knows what to offer us to keep us longer in its snares, or simply to please us.
As for the tiles with preferred content, they all relate to specific games, except for the first one, which is responsible for the streams dedicated to live, or content in which the dominant are conversations with users or monologues.
Twitch can also be downloaded as an application in Google Play, here.
Operating the panel
Administration panel gives us options to change the look of our profile. In the streaming manager we can see the statistics, which are presented as follows for each new user.
An interesting feature is also performing a raid, i.e. redirecting traffic to another user's stream.
Copyright
In the insights tile we can analyze the channel, see a summary of the broadcast and take a peek at our achievements.
On the community tab we can see the rank manager, activity from the editor or administrator level, or check the list of users watching us.
In the content tile there is an option to preview everything that concerns the created content broadcast on the author's channel.
In the video producer there is a clear message about copyright protection and possible consequences for violating it. "If you put protected material on your channel that you don't own the rights to, such as playing music in the background of a broadcast, you risk getting a copyright infringement warning. Repeated copyright infringement may affect your ability to stream. If you receive three warnings, your account will be closed" – we read in the message.
Drops
There is also a feature that allows you to give gifts to your viewers. However, these are not the usual gifts, such as chocolate or five zlotys on your account, but something more related to the main theme of the site, namely drops. After enabling drops, the watchers will receive a notification about the possibility of getting loot in the game.
Streaming
In the broadcast tools, choose one of the broadcast tools and use the broadcast key, which is located in the control panel. We have three choices: apps, mobile apps and streaming tools.
Apps for streaming on Twitch.tv it:
- Twitch Studio
- Open Broadcaster Software, Streamlabs OBS
- Lightstream Studio
- Melon
- OBS.Live
- XSplit Broadcaster
- Gamecaster
Mobile streaming apps are:
- Twitch App
- Omlet Arcade
- Streamlabs App
The tools for broadcasting are in turn:
- Soundtrack by Twitch
- Streamlabs
- StreamElements
- Muxy
- Opera Event
- OWN3D Pro
Twitch is mindful of Poles' earnings?
In August this year IThardware service.pl reported on subscription price cuts for countries affected by economic crisis. Europe, although it was at the end, has also been affected by this gracing, which for Poles means paying 4 PLN less per month, because instead of 22 PLN they will pay 18 PLN. This is the equivalent of about one euro. Spending just under twenty zlotys is not a big expense for most users anyway, given the opportunity to support your favorite artists.
Polish achievements
Polish Twitch record broken. Xayoo, a streamer we work with, is back after a hiatus to stream – over 187k viewers! pic.twitter.com/i22OZ1Otwr
— Monika Placzkowska (@m_placzkowska) August 14, 2021
The platform in our country is not as popular as, for example, in the United States, and the results it generates may be a little impressive in comparison to the views of some creators on youtube. However, keep in mind that twitch is live streaming and results are measured in real time. For YT, the score is continuously calibrated on a daily basis.
Comparing the result of the Polish youtube record from 2019, which amounted to 200 thousand viewers live, and whose winner was Lord Kruszwil channel during the first Fame MMA conference with the current Polish Twitch record belonging to Xayoo, which is 193 thousand people live, it's really not a big difference.
Krushwila's channel generated millions of views on its videos in 2019, though video streaming will always reap smaller rewards. Comparing the reach of the creators from these platforms, we are aware of the smaller share of Twitch on the Polish market, but also of its huge potential in the future.
