Play it your way: how Twitch lets disabled gamers earn a living online | Technology | The Guardian Games Play it your way: how Twitch lets disabled gamers earn a living online When epilepsy put Mackenzie out of work, she found a new way to make ends meet: streaming herself playing games. From Street Fighter experts with no arms to quadraplegic Diablo champions, a growing number are finding an unlikely source of income – and a real sense of community ‘It’s nice to have that kind of friendly group that I can essentially hang out with each day without having to leave the house’ … Twtich streamer Stacey Rebecca, who suffers from chronic back pain. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Friday 18 September 2015 07.01 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 10.04 EDT Share on Messenger Close In the summer of 2014, Mackenzie had just started working two minimum-wage jobs in Colorado when she suffered a major epileptic seizure at home, one that left her reeling and disoriented. She was home alone and, following the attack, too bewildered and drowsy to know to call in sick.

The infraction was enough to earn Mackenzie, who was 22 at the time, a so-called “no call, no show” blot on her record from each employer – a restaurant, where she worked tables, and a gym. While both companies knew about Mackenzie’s history of severe seizures, this was, they said, grounds for dismissal. She was told not to return to work. “I’m in the process of fighting it,” she tells me. “But both companies have a lot of money … ” Mackenzie’s seizures are so severe – she was featured earlier this year on MTV’s True Life: I Have Epilepsy – that she is unable to drive (or climb, or swim, or wield a knife, among many other things). Neither will she take the bus to work because, if she suffers a fit on board, well-meaning members of the public inevitably call for an ambulance to take her to the hospital – a costly trip in the US. Indeed, Mackenzie’s medical debts currently total more than $30,000. Jobs that are walking distance from her home are hard to find, and harder still to hold down.

Twitch's co-founder on the curious appeal of watching gamers game Read more Around the time she was dismissed, Mackenzie had started watching Twitch.tv, the online video streaming service on which you can log in to watch so-called “streamers” present live TV broadcasts. She’d heard that some of these presenters, who usually played video games on air, were popular enough that they were able to earn a living from their broadcasts. Moreover, many of these streamers were unable to work other jobs. There was NoHandsKen , a quadriplegic streamer who is dependent on a ventilator to breathe; Brolylegs , who, despite having no arms, is an expert player of Street Fighter, a game that requires immense dexterity (he describes himself as the “best Chun-Li with no hands”); DHHGamers , which stands for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers, a Twitch community for hearing-impaired gamers who stream and play a variety of online games; and a slew of others. Sensing a problem-solving opportunity, Mackenzie set up an account. Rather than trying to disguise her illness, she instead decided to advertise it via the droll handle Mackenseize .

Pinterest NoHandsKen plays World of Warcraft In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970m, a seemingly ludicrous amount for a website whose value and appeal might appear, to non-viewers, nebulous and ill-defined. In fact, the pitch is simple: Twitch is a service on which anyone is able to broadcast anything live online, from a live concert to a poetry recital. Broadcasters each have their own channel, and viewers follow their favourite presenters, like radio listeners who track their preferred DJs as they move from station to station. Viewers can channel-hop, leave live comments on what they’re watching, and even donate money to support the broadcasters they enjoy. Twitch is arguably the most democratic broadcasting television service yet devised, even if its subject matter is currently narrow. (Programmes on Twitch’s precursor, justin.tv, were general interest, but its popularity was immediately surpassed by that of Twitch , which launched as a video game-focused spinoff in June 2011.) Unlike, for example, YouTube , the videos are not recorded for posterity (though some do end up there). Like live television, the moment passes and is lost.

Log on to watch your favourite broadcaster while they are offline and you’ll be greeted with a blank page. This is appointment-viewing, as evidenced by the fact that, as well as individual broadcasters, Twitch also hosts live events, especially increasingly popular eSports tournaments, in which professional video game players compete for growing prize pots. In March, more than a million viewers logged in to watch the Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland – the record for the number of concurrent viewers watching a single channel on Twitch to date. Pinterest Brolylegs plays Street Fighter IV Twitch’s inscrutability derives from two factors. The audience is predominantly teenage, and the material they watch predominantly footage of people playing and talking about video games. Nevertheless, the numbers involved are extraordinary. A data survey in April 2014 found that Twitch had a 43% share of all live-streaming web traffic in the US. In the same year the site began to attract an average of 100 million unique viewers per month . Viewers watch for an average of 106 minutes per day – which adds up to many billions of minutes watched on Twitch per month.

Video games are no longer our species’ ultimate time-waster; that dubious accolade goes, instead, to watching other people play video games. On a wet Thursday morning, Mackenzie sits at her computer wearing a grey hoody and a pair of bulky headphones, with one can slipped off the ear. Her webcam is positioned flatteringly above one of the two computer screens in front of her. She ping-pongs her head between the two screens, one of which displays the match she’s currently playing over the internet – a competitive card game called Hearthstone – and the other the Twitch chat log, where her viewers leave comments on what she is doing. Pinterest Mackenseize having an epileptic seizure during a gaming stream “Eight, nine, 10 … he’s coming up to 11 health and we have eight damage,” she says, leaning in to the monitor at the climax of a match. “So if we get a dark bomb … actually, we can Boom? No, we can’t Boom Hellfire. That’s fine.” The conversation, which is arcane to anyone who is not versed in the complexities of Hearthstone, appears to be one-way.

Mackenzie’s is the only voice we hear, but she routinely responds to questions that her viewers pose in chat, turning the stream into a dialogue – “kenz, whats your favorite vanilla-flavored ice cream flavor?” asks one viewer. Later, the conversation turns to epilepsy. “I started smoking two years before I had any seizures,” she reports. Another viewer suggests that weed can be useful in controlling epilepsy. “At first I didn’t know what to do,” Mackenzie tells me, of her Twitch debut. She watched other streamers, studied their techniques and the things they talked to their viewers about while playing their chosen game – usually tips and techniques about what they were doing in the game, mixed in with more general talk about their lives. “If I enjoyed sitting in a particular stream, I’d copy what they did.” It was a steep learning curve. “I knew that this wasn’t going to go anywhere if I only streamed for a few hours each day, or only every other day,” she says. “I had an opportunity, and I wasn’t going to waste it. Almost from the start I was doing 60 hours a week.

I’d wake up, get dressed and showered, then start streaming from 11am through to 11pm every single day.” SpecialEffect: the charity making video games available for all Read more The hard work paid off. At first, Mackenzie would have a few dozen players entering her stream. A year later, that figure averages around 350. Mackenzie now has more than 27,000 followers, who are notified every time she starts a broadcast. She is also able to earn a living from this newly minted vocation. “Because I knew I wanted this to become my job, I installed a donation button right from the off.” This allowed viewers to donate money to Mackenzie in one-off payments, but the income was naturally uneven. “One month someone would donate a crazy amount of money,” she recalls. “Then the next month I’d only make $400. The first few months it was random, but I was still making more money than I had made on minimum-wage jobs to which I had to walk or catch the bus.” After six months, Mackenzie was invited to join Twitch’s partnership programme , which allowed her to add paid subscriptions to her channel.

Around 11,000 of Twitch’s 1.5 million streamers are partners. It costs viewers $4.99 per month to subscribe to a channel; half of this goes to Twitch, and the rest goes to the streamer. While Mackenzie’s income is still uneven, it has steadied now, and she has even been able to pay off some of her medical bills. The reasons for Twitch’s success can be difficult to unpick. Undoubtedly, it’s the latest triumph to rise from the recent seismic shifts in broadcasting. During the past five years, the rise of so-called “casters” has made internet stars of numerous young YouTube and Twitch broadcasters. The 24-year-old Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has more than 28 million subscribers to his channel, an audience that rivals that of America’s slick-haired talkshow hosts. PewDiePie reportedly earned $7.2m in 2014. The stars of these services share some of the attributes that propelled TV stars to fame in decades past: they are likable, watchable, humorous or insightful – even if they are, usually, laser-focused on a particular niche.

Pinterest PewDiePie plays Grand Theft Auto V The site’s success is also down to the interactive relationship between streamer and viewer. “The reason why Twitch is so sticky is because it is not just people watching video games; it’s a social video experience,” explains Chase, who helped launch the service in 2011. “The broadcasters are talking to the viewers and the people in chat are interacting with the broadcasters and each other; it is a very dynamic conversation.” Stacey Rebecca , a Twitch streamer from Croydon who suffers from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome – chronic back pain that makes it difficult for her to leave the house unaided – agrees. “It’s the excitement of it being live,” she says. “It’s more interactive and more personal for that reason. Getting to witness silly and cool things happen live makes it more interesting than YouTube to me.” Nevertheless, positive communities don’t happen naturally on Twitch, just as they don’t elsewhere on the internet, where the veil of anonymity encourages abusive behaviour. “I had to be strict about who I let in,” says Mackenzie. “That stunted building my audience.

It’s easy to get a large audience, especially as a woman, if you don’t moderate your chat at all, and you just let people come in and say whatever they want. A lot of people do drunk streams, or smoke on screen, and I don’t do that. It’s been slow and steady to build, but every time someone comes into the channel and enjoys it, they stay for a long time. I’m proud of that.” Nevertheless, Mackenzie chooses to keep her surname a secret, so as to maintain a certain degree of privacy, even as she lets strangers into her home via a video linkup daily. Stacey Rebecca, who had a following as a cosplayer (someone who dresses up as characters from films, video games and comics) before she joined Twitch, has also worked hard to cultivate a non-toxic community. “There are things called ‘stream raids’, where a group of bored teens will visit certain channel and post insults in the chat log,” she says. “But it’s copy-and-paste stuff. Because I’ve already done the cosplay stuff, I’ve heard pretty much every insult. Very often it’s not personal.

They’re just looking to get a reaction, and if they don’t, they get bored.” Pinterest Stacey Rebecca plays Hearthstone Only a relative handful of disabled streamers earn their living from the service, but as well as providing a supplemental income, Twitch offers a support community. “Twitch gives me that feeling of being less isolated,” says Stacey Rebecca. “I have a lot of regulars, and it’s nice to have that kind of friendly group that I can essentially hang out with each day without having to leave the house. And because I’ve been open about my mental health problems, I attract a lot of viewers who are experiencing anxiety. It helps us both feel less isolated. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.” As well as providing new jobs, Twitch has proven a powerful fundraising tool. The site claims that it helped raise more than $10m for charity in 2014. When she lost one of her friends to suicide recently, Stacey Rebecca held a 12-hour charity stream, raising more than £6,500 for Mind , the mental health charity. “The charity was a little confused about what I was proposing,” she says.

“So I explained it like a telethon – like Comic Relief, but online.” YouTube star PewDiePie responds to 'haters' over $7.4m annual earnings Read more Likewise, Mackenseize sees her work as helping to promote understanding about epilepsy. When she had a severe seizure live on air, soon after she first started streaming, she says it only strengthened the bond between her and her viewers (she subsequently uploaded the footage to YouTube , to show people what a seizure looks like). In this way Twitch is helping to foster openness and vulnerability around illness in a way that would have been unthinkable in the past. Even so, it’s been difficult for Mackenzie to explain to her family what she does. “My mum never says anything positive about the stream,” she says. “She doesn’t want to view it as a positive thing because she just wants me to come home. But yesterday she said on the phone that my stream gives her faith in humanity, because there are so many strangers out there willing to help.” While the positive aspect to the arrangement is clear in Mackenzie’s case, her schedule is nevertheless gruelling and, as she mainly focuses on a single game – at which she has become an expert – surely repetitive. Is it still fun?

“Oh yes,” she says. “Times a million. There will always be challenges in the game because the developer keeps adding new cards and mixing things up. That keeps the game fresh. And I am always so excited to stream. There’s never a day I don’t want to. Well, maybe when I’m feeling lazy, and don’t want to take a shower or do my makeup. But once I start, I always end up loving what I’m doing.” Twitch's co-founder on the curious appeal of watching gamers game | Media Network | The Guardian Publishing and platforms Twitch's co-founder on the curious appeal of watching gamers game Six months after Amazon bought out the video-game streaming site for a reported $970m, Emmett Shear says little has changed for fans Emmett Shear says people enjoy watching anyone doing something at the highest level of skill. Photograph: Twitch Supported by Tuesday 17 March 2015 06.39 EDT Last modified on Thursday 13 October 2016 16.10 EDT Share on Messenger Close Each month gamers from across the world log on to Twitch to spend over 300m hours watching other gamers game.

It is an online phenomenon that has grown with such furious speed that Amazon paid a reported $970m to acquire the site in August last year . The secretive deal was struck after negotiations with Google apparently broke down, shocking the wider tech community and many of Twitch’s own employees . To non-gamers, the appeal of Twitch is curious. Why, the line of inquiry goes, would you want to watch others game when you can game yourself? It’s a question that Twitch’s co-founder and CEO Emmett Shear, a 31-year-old Yale computer science graduate, answers comfortably: “What it comes down to is people enjoy watching anyone doing something at the highest level of skill or with great savoir-faire, and that’s what Twitch is for video games. It’s this chance to watch these people who are really great at it do it.” Shear compares the service to the Cooking Channel and sports channel ESPN, and points out that almost all TV that isn’t drama or comedy is a showcase of human talent: “If you don’t love video games, just imagine something you do love.

Don’t you like watching people who are the best in the world at this play and talk about it?” A gamer’s personality on the site is almost as important as their game play, with some clocking more than 150m channel views and earning upwards of $300,000 (£200,000) a year through partnerships. I still feel it's run with a lot of independence, but reporting into a larger corporation is very different Emmett Shear The announcement of the Amazon deal sparked a backlash among Twitch’s loyal fan base, some of whom worried that it would lose its authenticity. Shear’s team responded during the acquisition process by reaching out to the community, reassuring them that “the things that are changing are all things you wanted to change”, Shear says. Six months later, Shear says any negative reaction from gamers has died down. He explains that access to game developers and a wealth of other Amazon resources marks the biggest change for the company’s operations, and that his role as CEO has shifted in two ways. Before the sale, Shear worked with a board of directors to direct the company’s strategy. Now, for the first time in his life, he reports to someone else.

“That’s very different. I still feel like it’s run with a lot of independence but your relationship reporting into a larger corporation is very different from your relationship with a board of directors,” he says. “I had a great board of directors, but inherently you’re worried when you’re talking to them about your next raise or what does an IPO look like and questions like that. Once you’re part of a larger company you get to have a more long-term view on things.” Twitch started life in 2011 as a spinoff of Justin.tv, a general-interest streaming platform that was quickly eclipsed in size and subsequently closed under the Amazon acquisition in August. In January this year, Twitch introduced a couple of new features that have brought more music on to the site . He says: “We used to run all kinds of video stream across the board. We focused down on gaming and the question is should we open that back up again?

The acquisition doesn’t really change the math on that.” I really think if you play video games, Twitch is probably going to be a part of your future Emmett Shear While Shear explains that he does not think it will ever make sense to move the focus away from gaming, he adds that if there is a demand from users for content then he will try to fulfil it. Twitch already has three sources of revenue – advertising, including sponsored partnerships with leading gamers, subscriptions and merchandise – but Shear is well aware of the enormous task that lies ahead if he is to develop the platform to its potential. “I really think if you play video games, Twitch is probably going to be a part of your future. I don’t think we underestimate the size of that challenge. We’ve got a long road ahead of us. It’s truly a huge challenge and it’s another almost order of magnitude growth of where we are today.” Asked whether he still manages to find the time to play games, Shear says: “I definitely do. It’s almost part of my job.

If I stopped playing video games I feel like I would lose touch with understanding Twitch at all.” Emmett Shear will be speaking at the Changing Media Summit on 19 March To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, sign up free for Media Network membership . All Guardian Media Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled ‘Advertisement feature’. Find out more here . How A Site That Streams People Playing Video Games Became A Billion Dollar Business - BuzzFeed News Business How A Site That Streams People Playing Video Games Became A Billion Dollar Business Twitch CEO Emmett Shear wasn’t born a leader, he became one almost by accident. And he now runs one of the most valuable video properties on the web, just purchased by Amazon . The Justin.tv founding team, from left to right: Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt, Emmett Shear, and Michael Seibel. Flickr / Karen / Via Flickr: misbehave ID: 3513934 The genesis of Twitch, one of the most popular gaming-related Websites and applications in the world, can be traced to a few informal meetings in the fall of 2010, including one with Gideon Yu.

The former chief financial officer of YouTube, who negotiated that site’s $1.65 billion sale to Google and parlayed some of his windfall into a 5% ownership stake in the San Francisco 49ers, came by Justin.tv’s offices — which by then had raised $8 million in venture capital and had begun to generate revenue by morphing from a site originally conceived to stream the life of co-founder Justin Kan into a platform where anyone can stream video. According to Michael Seibel, another Justin.tv co-founder, Yu came in and gave the company the kick in the pants it needed. “He came by and basically said, ‘You guys have got something, it’s making some money, but you haven’t really made anything of significant impact, so you can sit on your ass and make a salary and not run this like a startup, or you can build something real out,” Seibel said. That meeting, coupled with other conversations like one Kan had with SAY Media’s Matt Sanchez, convinced the team to start a few skunkworks projects internally.

Taken together, the discussions with Yu and Sanchez marked the start of a process that would eventually morph Justin.tv into two companies with two different missions — Twitch, a site consisting of video streams of people playing video games , and Socialcam, a mobile app for sharing video. It also marked the beginning of Justin.tv co-founder Emmett Shear’s evolution from engineer to executive, an unlikely ascent that transformed Twitch into one of the most valuable video-streaming companies in the world. Now Twitch is among the companies on Google’s shopping list, being eyed for a reported price of around one billion dollars. (The company announced Tuesday that it would wind down Justin.tv’s operations in order to devote all of its resources to Twitch.) ID: 3513897 Shear and Vogt, wearing one of the original prototype “livecasting” cameras, in 2007. Flickr / Brian Caldwell / Via Flickr: briancaldwell ID: 3513647 Childhood friends Shear and Kan both attended The Evergreen School for Gifted Children on the northern end of Seattle. They were bonded by their proficiency in accelerated mathematics and Magic: the Gathering, one of the most famous fantasy-focused collectible card games.

(Shear is actually known for playing a persistently frustrating version of the game dubbed “draw-go,” in which the player does nothing on their actual turn but has an answer to everything his or her opponent plays.) Though they went to separate high schools, they worked together as part of a NASA competition and eventually attended Yale together. They began working on their first startup, a Google-calendar like app called Kiko, during their senior year. There was little evidence at the time of Kiko’s founding that Shear would blossom into the leader he is today. He was an expert engineer, a coder who would stay up late into the night fixing the company’s ever-changing (and ever-breaking) software. In Silicon Valley parlance, Shear was the “technical co-founder” that is often paired with someone with a good sense for design and product or a strong marketer who can sell a service to the masses. By the time Kiko was sold — on eBay of all places — for somewhere around $250,000, the entrepreneurial itch had taken hold of Shear and Kan. “I wanted to build internet companies, and by the end of college I knew that,” Shear told BuzzFeed.

“I entered college thinking I wanted to go into science, but I realized my passion was doing more engineering-oriented things.” Shear and Kan next pitched Paul Graham, founder of prestigious Silicon Valley startup academy Y Combinator, on a service that laid out and printed web content into a physical coffee table book. Graham’s response: “What else do you guys have?” That’s when the duo pitched the idea of a 24/7 show of Kan’s life streamed over the Internet. Graham’s response to this pitch, Kan said, was: “That sounds crazy enough that I’d fund it.” They left the meeting with a check for $50,000 and their second acceptance into Y Combinator. (Kiko being the first.) ID: 3515143 The inaugural Y Combinator batch. YC founder Paul Graham is on the far right, and this class also included now-partner and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Justin Kan ID: 3513941 Shear’s engineering prowess was already evident during Justin.tv’s early days in 2007, when Amazon called asking them to temporarily limit their bandwidth usage while the company shifted traffic.

Amazon had recently launched several services that allowed startups to offload live streaming video and other bandwidth heavy processes onto remote servers for a fee. Amazon’s services dovetailed with Justin.tv’s move to open its website to allow anyone to live stream video, thus pressuring Amazon’s capacity. While it was meant to be temporary, that move actually pushed the company into buying its own servers and infrastructure to handle live streaming video. The company now operates 15 data centers that handle 55 million unique visitors every month, each of which watches an average of 106 minutes of streaming video a day. In retrospect, the move looks prescient — Twitch now streams video for a fraction of the cost most modern startups pay Amazon for their AWS bills. “The whole idea of building out a peering network all over the world so they could deliver really high quality video really quickly was a little counterintuitive,” said Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil, an investor in Twitch, adding that Shear realized the importance of service quality and availability and emphasized that from the company’s earliest days.

Shear and a few others internally, including Kevin Lin, who would go on to become Twitch’s chief operating officer, quickly recognized that video game broadcasting was responsible for a lot of Justin.tv’s growth. They were keenly aware of this because they were gamers themselves — Shear had a particular affinity for Warcraft II and Starcraft — and had recognized the potential of broadcasting video game matches over the Internet. At the same time, Kan and Seibel were noticing another trend: everyone was buying smartphones, and the entire way people would interface with the Web was changing to fit those devices. After those meetings with Sanchez and Yu in 2010, the Justin.tv team decided that they would begin working on two skunkworks projects: a service dedicated to streaming video games called Justin.tv gaming — which would go on to become Twitch — and a mobile app that would go on to become Socialcam. ID: 3515226 A shot of one of Justin.tv’s first server clusters, captioned, “a weekend’s worth of work.” Justin Kan ID: 3515737 The deal was that after six months whichever project was gaining the most traction would be the future of Justin.tv.

Surprisingly, both projects took off, and the team decided to spin out Socialcam from Justin.tv, with Seibel and a few other engineers taking the lead of that service. Justin.tv, after the meeting with Yu in 2010, morphed into Twitch and officially launched at E3, the gaming industry’s largest trade show, in 2011. Throughout the construction of Twitch, it became clear that Shear was as good at conceiving the products as he was at building them. He noticed, for example, that video quality had to be very high and that the entire service should be built around the needs of broadcasters, two reason why Twitch is so popular among gamers. Attention to those details was quickly embraced by many of the service’s initial broadcasters, like Cosmo Wright , a Twitch streamer who holds the world record for beating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the shortest amount of time — 18 minutes and 10 seconds . With the broadcasters came the audience. Within a year of the site’s official launch at E3, Twitch had already attracted 20 million viewers and had rolled out a program that would enable its broadcasters to get paid for their streams as part of its partner program.

Twitch’s massive audience, highly focused on gaming, was effectively a gold mine for advertisers — which offered a huge opportunity for both Twitch and the players in the program. Twitch.tv had gone from a concept into a tool that enabled gamers to literally play video games for a living, much like Wright began doing in January last year. “I feel privileged as I was on the site when it was Justin.tv and the timing of it was a lucky part of my success,” Wright told BuzzFeed. “Being a content creator on Twitch is actually quite special.” Of course, it hasn’t always been easy for Shear and Twitch. Just this week, the company rolled out a tool that would mute old videos that had licensed music playing in the background. Designed to protect the community from getting in trouble with music rights holders, the tool misfired and muted many old videos because it thought the actual video game music was copyrighted — enraging many in the Twitch community. Shear admitted that part was an accident , but it underscored the importance of Twitch’s dedication to its community of streamers, many of whom — including Wright — piled on with their complaints on an “ ask me anything ” Reddit thread.

At first, Shear’s approach to management was to do things himself rather than delegate — a byproduct of his engineering acumen. But, according to Kan, “through the transition of coming up with the idea for Twitch and running that small team, and that team growing and growing, he’s become a better manager than any of the other founders.” “It was a very dramatic transformation from an introverted engineer to an extroverted person who can motivate a team of 100-something people behind a common goal,” said Kyle Vogt, another Justin.tv co-founder who helped build Twitch with Shear in the earliest days. Shear’s enthusiasm for gaming, coupled with his relentless focus on Twitch’s community and broadcasters, made partnerships an easy sell – with the pitch being that Twitch was a brand-new, and massive, marketing tool for traditional game developers. Roughly a year after its launch, companies such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty creator Activision-Blizzard were already using Twitch as a vehicle for showcasing their games.

The official Twitch.tv channel for Blizzard’s most recent online card game Hearthstone , for instance, garnered a huge audience viewing demonstrations of its newest additions at one point before it rolled out the update, Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime told BuzzFeed. Traditionally, building that kind of hype would require expensive marketing campaigns, but with Twitch it became easier to connect developers with their audience, the actual players that want to know more about the game. “It was very exciting for us to see Hearthstone shoot right up the charts on Twitch,” Morhaime said. “We had about 150,000 viewers at one point watching the game, which I think is a great proxy for level of interest in the content.” Shear has also struck deals to integrate Twitch into Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 game consoles. But perhaps his smartest move was to have his team court advertisers well before Twitch planned on pitching and selling its own ads. “They were warming up advertisers to the existence of Twitch and what it was, they weren’t trying to sell them anything,” said Bessemer’s Kurzweil.

“It doesn’t seem like a brilliant strategy but it was really smart — they took an ads sales team in-house last year and I’ve never seen a sales team work so effectively. The big ad guys knew what it was before they had an opportunity to buy it. That was sort of like, in hindsight, of course you would do that. But that was not obvious at the time.” ID: 3515758 Wright streaming The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time when he successfully set the world record for beating the game in the shortest time. Twitch.tv ID: 3516001 The community, too, continues to grow beyond competitive games like Starcraft. Twitch is now one of the largest platforms for live-streaming “speed-running,” which is basically racing to the ending of a game and competing based on time. Twitch.tv has also become a popular spot for live-streaming Minecraft, a game that is essentially a virtual world filled with Lego-like building blocks. Most recently, Twitch.tv enabled broadcasters to “host” other broadcasts, effectively enabling its user base to have a channel that runs 24/7 whether they are playing games or not.

And the company is still discovering new use cases for its online streaming service, such as “Twitch Plays Pokemon,” where the site’s chat function was used to input commands for an emulated version of the game. The result: hundreds of thousands of people trying to play Pokemon on the same gameboy. “Twitch Plays Pokemon” ended up spawning a whole subgenre of Twitch.tv streams where viewers are able to collectively play a game. When the company was accepting a Webby award, Twitch vice president of marketing Matt DiPietro’s five-word acceptance speech was “praise be to the Helix,” a play on a meme the community created while the game was running. The Twitch community’s most recent viral oddity, dubbed “Fish Plays Pokemon,” began this week with a stream of the game of Pokemon where the character moves based on where a fish is floating in a fish tank . Though Twitch has become a genuine phenomenon — and potential one billion dollar buyout target — Shear remains humble. “In the end, we’re a website where people can come and watch video and chat and talk about the video,” Shear said. “In many ways our business is more similar to Vimeo or Youtube than it is to Activision-Blizzard’s.

We’re more a social network and media company that happens to be focused on exclusively video gaming content.” ID: 3516087 Twitch Is Taking Over the Web One Gamer at Time SHARE It's already bigger than Hulu, Amazon, and Facebook video How many gamers does it take to catch a Pokemon? 1.1 million, apparently. That’s how many people played the Game Boy classic Pokemon Red—together—on the video game streaming website Twitch.tv in February. As the game streamed online, people used a chat client to submit 122 million button inputs, often simultaneously, to control the movements of the main character as he pursued his quest of becoming a Pokemon master. It was an impractical but oddly hypnotic way to try to beat a video game. After two and a half weeks of wildly scrolling through menus, running in erratic circles, and occasionally defeating enemies, the gamers collectively toppled the Elite Four and saw the end credits roll. But the true victor of the endeavor was Twitch itself, which is quickly becoming one of the hottest entertainment properties on the Web. Begun in 2011 as an offshoot of the live-streaming website Justin.tv, Twitch allows users to broadcast virtually any video game live online.

Players can offer live color commentary or, as with Pokemon, let viewers help control the game through a chat window that runs next to the gameplay. The site now attracts 45 million unique viewers and 1 million broadcasters each month. In February it comprised 1.8 percent of total Internet traffic during peak hours, beating Hulu, Amazon and Facebook. The idea that people would enjoy sitting back and watching video games, the most interactive of media formats, might seem counterintuitive. But Twitch CEO Emmett Shear says the halcyon days of gaming in the ‘80s and ‘90s were as much about watching as playing. “When you think about what it was like to play video games in the arcade, you put your quarter on the arcade machine and you waited your turn,” he says. “What did you do while you were waiting your turn? You watched the people who were up there playing.” The popularity of arcades collapsed in the late ‘90s as people began playing competitively online instead of face-to-face. Communal gaming experiences became more rare. But as live streaming via the Interent became more common in the late 2000’s, gamers began using video sites to stream gameplay of PC titles.

Shear, a cofounder of Justin.tv, watched an increasing number of StarCraft II streams popping up on the site saw the opportunity to spinoff this emerging usage into its own business. The company debuted Twitch.tv at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo, the huge annual video game conference in Los Angeles. In the ensuing two and a half years, Twitch has become the go-to source for live-streaming games. Players use it to watch and broadcast speedruns, a popular competitive format in which people complete games as quickly as possible. Matchups among professional gamers in competitive titles like League of Legends are regularly streamed on the service. And now, thanks to the Pokemon experiment, the emergent field of crowd-sourced gaming is becoming popular with other titles like Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. In Twitch Plays Pokemon, users can input commands through a chat window to control the game’s main character Twitch may have finally figured out how to translate video games into lean-back entertainment, a goal that has eluded the television industry for years. Comcast launched the gaming-focused cable channel G4 in 2002, but it consistently suffered low ratings and cancelled the last of its programs related to video games in 2012.

Shear says Twitch’s focus on actual gameplay instead of news and reviews gives it an edge over TV’s offerings. “G4 never actually had video games on it,” he says. “[Twitch] is the best players in the entire world showing off their skills at this game.” The company won’t say whether its rapid growth has led to profits. Twitch sells both display ads and pre-roll video ads, as well as $4.99-per-month subscriptions for the most popular channels. The company splits the revenue from the ads and subscriptions evenly with broadcasters. Matthew DiPietro, vice president of marketing, says Twitch appeals to advertisers because it attracts millions of tech-savvy young males, a sought-after group that is sometimes hard to reach through traditional channels. “Gamers are a particularly savvy and particularly fickle bunch,” he says. “They tend to be cord cutters. They’re a very valuable demographic for brands but they’re also very hard to reach.” Brands such as Samsung, Unilever and Mountain Dew have advertised on Twitch, in addition to many video game companies. Twitch is poised to grow even more in 2014 as it expands beyond its PC roots.

The PlayStation 4 came equipped with the ability to live stream to Twitch’s website when it launched in November. Twenty percent of Twitch’s broadcasters now stream from the device. The Xbox One added the same functionality this week, just in time for the console’s first big exclusive, the Electronic Arts shooter Titanfall. With hardcore gamers in its pocket, the company is aiming for casual gamers next—last week the company released developer tools which could potentially let people live stream mobile games like Candy Crush Saga and Flappy Bird. Now that Twitch has proven there’s a large appetite for live games, competitors are starting to swarm the sector. Ustream, a larger competitor that live-streams all kinds of content, can also broadcast from the PS4. YouTube, a hugely popular website for gaming footage, released developer tools last year to make live streaming games easier and recently broadened the number of people who can live stream content. For now, though, Twitch is available on the most platforms to the widest audience. And it has a passionate user base—Twitch Plays Pokemon, the oddball experiment turned Internet phenomenon, wasn’t developed by Twitch staff but instead by a regular user of the site. “That’s actaully the most exciting thing to me about it,” Shear says.

“We built a platform where it’s flexible enough and powerful enough that other people can come up with really cool new things that have never been seen before.” MORE: The History of Video Game Consoles – Full Talking Livestreams, eSports and the Future of Entertainment with Twitch Talking Livestreams, eSports and the Future of Entertainment with Twitch {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe "Streaming" is a term that's entered the video game lexicon only in the past few years or so. It refers to live online streams of internet personalities and top level gamers playing their favorite titles while thousands watch. The rise of stream watching as a past time can be directly correlated with the recent surge of interest in eSports, aka professional video gaming. Players and teams gather sponsors and train daily in order to compete to become the best in the world. Fans watch pro players goof around, practice and play in massive tournaments, all through the portal of a stream on their computer.

No brand is more closely associated with this movement than Twitch.tv . The service was spawned out of livestream site Justin.tv in 2011 when eSports started to rise, and it's far and away the most popular streaming service for players to use to this day. This week they announced Twitch Turbo, a new subscription model that allows players to watch streams ad free. Before that, they debuted in-game livestream tools for Black Ops 2 that lets players broadcast directly from the game. Their growth is astonishing, with millions tuning in to huge tournaments, but even tens of thousands watching individual players simply play a popular title. As recently as last night, I believe a single player, League of Legend's Voyboy , broke a record with 50,000+ viewers simultaneously watching him play online. Not for a tournament mind you, just an evening of casual play. For this piece, I got the chance to speak with Matthew DiPietro, VP of Marketing for Twitch. We talked about the site's current popularity, how they support an entire generation of players making a living via the service, and what they have planned next. Read on below: Forbes: First up, some numbers. What sort of growth has Twitch seen over the past year?

DiPietro: The growth we've seen in the last year has been meteoric. We're flirting with 25 million unique viewers in December, we get more than 300,000 unique broadcasters per month, more than 3000 partners in the Twitch Partner Program. Our viewers watch more than 1.5 hours per day on average (that's per day!). The community that's coalescing on Twitch is huge and varied, but more than that, incredibly passionate. How do you keep up with that kind of expansion? Is it a struggle to meet demand with the popularity of streaming skyrocketing as of late? It's certainly a major challenge to keep up with demand, but a challenge we take with an air of gratitude. First, there's the challenge of delivering high quality live video on a global basis. That's no small task and one that occupies a large portion of our engineers on any given day. Second there's the challenge of servicing members of our Partner Program - which includes every type of broadcaster from individual personalities to large organizations like MLG and IPL. How much of your viewership is divided between daily player streams and bigger weekend long tournaments or events? Great question.

The whole pie (the head of the tail and the long tail, if you prefer) is growing at a breakneck speed. The large tournaments like IPL events, LoL finals, MLG tournaments, and etc. provide for huge spikes in traffic, but those spikes are smoothed out by the growth of our broadcasting base as a whole, and the steady increases in mid-size channels. What are the most viewed games currently streamed on Twitch? Why do you think these games are the ones that people specifically want to watch others play?

Question: Twitch.tv, where people can among other things watch gamers playing online, was generated by what other site?
Answer: Justin.tv