TechStuff Twitches

been on an airplane. So that's where we're at. Today's episode is brought to us courtesy of a little listener mail. This one is from Daniel via actual email. Yeah, apparently people still use that. By the way, guys, we've seen a big upswing and listener and email and Facebook and Twitter. We love it. Keep up the great so so much. We're sending we We love every single note that we receive. Even if we are too incredibly stressed out to respond to all of you. We love you, Thank you so much.

I'm trying desperately to get through all the backlogs, so if you have written, I am working my way back to you, babe. Anyway, Daniel, he wrote to us to say, I don't know if you did this before, but we've recently had the news then online gaming streaming service called Twitch is surpassing live streaming services like you Stream, w w E Network live Stream, and other streaming services by volume. However, I don't really hear about it outside of gamer groups,

which is odd to me. Can you all get into the details about how Twitch works, or maybe into live streaming in general. It's a growing trend in recent years. I can only see getting bigger as gaming audiences grow. You know what, Daniel, We agree it's a great topic. It's one that's become incredibly important as of the week.

We're recording this podcast because they're Okay. So there's this rumor going around, and at this point it's a very strong rumor, although the parties that are involved are still not commenting officially on it, that Google in the form of YouTube is interested in purchasing Twitch for a billion dollars. So this was a story broken by Variety originally, and then it was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal, although again no one from either Twitch nor Google is is

commenting on the subject. By the time this podcast comes out, it may very well be that all of this is supremely old news and that the the deal has either been agreed upon or declined, but we don't as we're recording this, don't know the outcome al right where we are recording this on May twenty and um, and yeah,

these these two sources. By the way, Variety in the Wall Street Journal reported different stories, um that the sale is already certain, or that the talks are in early stages, and that Twitch might just sell stake in their company instead of selling the entire company as a whole. Right, And even though official sources are not doing any talking about it right now, anonymous sources have done a lot of talking. For for example, Verage reported that other companies,

including Microsoft we're also according Twitch, but have been turned down. Um. At any rate, It's it's a really interesting news item for for both the gaming industry and the live streaming industry. And I guess video on the internet as a whole, yeah, And keeping in mind that video on the internet is still a very young thing. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that you didn't have any sort of video

hosting services. And the way you would get video on the internet is that someone would save a video file and you'd have to download the whole thing to watch it. So this is a this is kind of showing the next step in in the the world of video online. So we've got the prerecorded stuff, which YouTube has got pretty sewn up at least for user generated. Then you've got the pre record stuff that is made by studios and television networks. Now that's all over the place like Netflix, Hulu,

all that kind of stuff. And then you have broadcast where you're doing a live streaming event, which is what Twitch and other services like Twitch are all about. So how does that work? Why is it such a big deal of why why would Google even be interested in it? A lettle in one billion dollars worth of interest in Yeah, So we thought we would first go into a little bit of history. We like to always look back into

how things became what they are. So let's, uh, let's just think we're not going to get into the way back machine because this is pretty recent history. Lauren and I both lived through this history. It wasn't going on immediately around us, but we were technically alive while it was happening, yes, which is relatively rare for the two of us. For lots of the history that we do on this show. Yeah, there was a period in when

I was dead to the world. So anyway, Twitch is kind of a first of all, it's a spinoff of another company. It's so in order to understand where Twitch came from, you have to go back a little further and look at the origin of this other company, Justin TV exactly who, which was founded by Justin Cohn, Emmett Sheer, Michael Cybel, and Kyle Vauched. And so here's the thing. Even that company was the product of some other some other work done by this group of people that didn't

work out so much. You see, you had this group who created a web calendar software called Keiko. This was from a group who had gone to Yale together I think, and formed the company soon after graduation. And so they were approached by a brand new seed company called y Combinator. And a seed company is all about finding startups to to finance, to fund, hoping that those startups will blossom and therefore those investments will end up making huge returns

in return. You also see these companies that otherwise might not have a chance grow into something really interesting. Right. Part of that same batch was both Reddit and Infogami, which is one of those companies that was started by Aaron Schwartz. Yeah, so amazing group of people, right, So not just the smarty pants folks behind Kiko, but these

other groups as well. I mean, Reddit is now one of the more popular sites on the Internet has a flourishing community, although it's a community that has its own uh issues and in fighting. Well yeah, I think the more popular Reddit gets, the more irritated the hardcore audience. But the same thing happened to dig so it'll be interesting to see what happens with Reddit. But that's a totally different podcast. So here's the thing about kiko um.

It was, according to Justin con himself, not that great of a product, and the reason he gave behind that was that he and his fellow programmers didn't really need a calendar. He said, I was going to college, I had two classes, I had classes on on two days of the week, and otherwise I was sitting around programming. So what the heck do I need a schedule for?

It does not useful to me. So since I didn't need it, I wasn't using it, and since I don't use it, the products we were making weren't very compelling. And then Google calendar comes out and everyone's like, well, so they decided what we're gonna do is we're gonna sell this company for as much as we can so that we can pay back our investors and then constrate something else. So of course, they sold their company the

way any sane person would. They listed it on eBay, and it's sold on eBay for some two and fifty eight thousand dollars to a Canadian company called two Cows to Cows. Two Cows. Yeah, yeah, they have two cows, twice as many cows as someone who has one cow. So yeah, except its spelled t u c ows, but yeah, it's it's It was funny because they were going for

just fifty dollars. They wanted fifty grand. They were hoping they could get fifty grand so they could pay off their investors, and then they saw that it had hit eighty grand and they thought, oh, we got some walk in money now, and it finally sold for two eight thousand dollars on eBay. All right, yeah, yeah, two two cows and a calendar app that. Yeah, that's great. I had no idea you could actually list a company on eBay, and the idea that that's involved in the terms of

service blows my mind. Anyway, they successfully sell Keiko, and in two thousand seven, Justin and Emmett pitched this idea of justin dot TV to Paul Graham. Paul Graham was the guy who founded the y Combinator Seed company, and the premise originally was not for some sort of live broadcast uh service for the general public, all right, It was sort of a curiosity. The idea was to just put a webcam um basically on on Kan's head and have it broadcast twenty four hours a day, seven days

a week. So I think that he was doing so it was justin TV, justin TV, right, it was. It was like it was a kind of life casting, except instead of having the camera turned back on himself, it was more or less from his perspective and view. Yeah, yeah,

there's some great stories about weird things that happening. Within the first week of going live, apparently his audience felt that it was not the most compelling of of entertainment, that watching a guy sit in an apartment and code was not necessarily the most interesting subject matter, that it needed a little bit of spice, so um, so they provided it to the audience. Provided the spice this is where you know, it's kind of like when you hear about a news outlet making the news. In this case,

it was the audience making the contact content. How do they make the content? They contact the police and say that there was a report of a stabbing incident in Justin Kahn's apartment. So the police pay a little visit. By the way, this entire incident is preserved on YouTube if you want to watch it. And so you hear the cops knocking at the door, they come inside. They

explained that they got a report about stabbing. Pretty quickly, Justin figures out, Hey, the it's our users who have decided that this is this would be entertaining to watch. What a bunch of scamps um. There were other incidents that were similar, where they would call in fake fires and there were like six or seven fire trucks lined

outside of Justin's apartment legally culpable scamps that. Yeah, So eventually they decided, hey, you know this, Uh, this idea isn't working because Justin's just not interesting enough off to keep everyone's attention. Uh. There are other incidents as well. There are plenty of videos online that explained the hijinks these guys got up to But what happened was they decided this isn't sustainable, it's not entertaining, So what can we do. How can we modify what we've built into

something that actually resonates with people. So they revisit the idea and they discussed different approaches, and they came up with this idea of using the justin TV as a platform for other people to broadcast things live over the Internet. So this was the democratization of live broadcast. YouTube had created the democratization of of sharing video. But but you didn't.

You couldn't do live events on YouTube at the time, So what would where would you go if you wanted to have like a live call in show, for example, and you were using maybe Skype for people to call in so that you could answer questions live on the air, You didn't really have that option. But because people couldn't hear you and then respond to you in real time, twitch or not twitch. But justin TV was a chance

of doing that. So it's kind of interesting. They said that the only reason they were able to do it is because while they had been developing justin dot tv, uh, they had advanced the technology to a point that brought the cost of streaming video down significantly to just like a couple of cents or a couple of fractions of assent UH for a minute of video, which was important because you know, depending upon how much bandwidth you were using, your I s P might be charging you quite a

bit for it. Oh sure, but at that rate, with a combination of advertising revenue from from ads and also money from investors, they could kind of plug along, yeah exactly. The ad supported videos helped them recapture some of the costs, and they also got some pretty significant funding, like their their first round UH netted them about two million dollars. They would later get I think twenty million a couple

of years down the road. So they were getting money from investors who said, this is the future of this kind of internet delivery system. Plus they were thinking ahead of how can we monetize this so that once once we get past that investment period, how do we keep making money? And that was through the ad support, So they began to think, how can we really make it

easier for people to find the stuff they want? Because as more people join, it gets crowded, right, and you're like, well, there's a ton of people on here, but I'm only

interested in one specific topic. Uh. And so they started to make categories and things like people who wanted to talk about business, or people who wanted to talk about fashion, or people wanted to talk about sports or video games, and the video games category began to get incredibly popular, something that mystified justin by the way you can watch video interviews, and he said, I just didn't get it. People were playing video games and streaming their video game

experience online and other people were watching it. What's up with that? He just he was like, I didn't understand it, but I realized that other people found it valuable, So we knew that it was something we had to look at. So they start thinking, well, you know, this makes a lot of sense. We've we've got all these people who are um watching stuff. We should try and take advantage of that. So they ultimately on June six, two eleven, launched twitch dot tv in public beta as a completely

separate brand. Now, this was the idea of let's take that video game content that everyone is streaming and create a product specifically for that, with tools built in to help people do that more smoothly, so they don't have to create their own system at home to make it work. We're going to try and integrate it in as many different approaches as possible so that more people can do this, because it's clearly a runaway success story, and it made much more sense to create a new brand than to

just nestle it under justin dot tv. In fact, Twitch dot tv was getting bigger than just dot tv. Yeah, they they basically immediately found an audience. They started with some three point two million unique visitors per month. Yep. Yeah, they they've increased that a little bit. Yes, about a year later, they would hit twenty million unique visitors per month. Yeah, and I think they're at forty five million currently, so it is essentially doubled, like year over year, more than

doubled on that first one. So that was pretty impressive. And you know, keep in mind that back in June two th eleven, it was just in beta. It wasn't even the full release yet. So they started having lots of Like there's certain games that that definitely drove participation, StarCraft too being a big one. Anything that you can

get big tournaments going for exactly. So, and you know there are places like in South Korea where StarCraft tournaments are, like the super Bowl is here in the United States, so you get these enormous crowds live audiences watching these well only here in the US. It just it never really caught on that way, mostly because production costs or something like that. If you wanted to televise it, we're so high that you would have trouble getting the audience

large enough to justify that expense. But the overhead for Twitch is way lower. I mean, you don't have as many employees for one thing, the infrastructure is once you've made the investment, much less expensive than television. So it was sort of the perfect platform for that and it

really took off. It also allows the audience to talk to each other during the event in a way that the normal broadcast television obviously doesn't allow unless you invite a lot of your friends over right, or you have some app where you can watch the show and talk with other fans. But we've seen this over and over that television makes it. It's really hard to get something like that to work from a television platform and poured

it over into an online interactive platform. Usually you see people just use either Twitter or Facebook for that kind of thing, right, And in eleven that wasn't so much the case quite yet, No, no, you know, so this in this case, you have a platform that by its very nature allows for that kind of thing. However, as of eleven it's still was not profitable and would not become I think it technically has never been profitable for a full year. They are estimating that as it will be, right,

But well, well we'll see. You have to get that great balance of AD dollars and user base in order to make it profitable. And of course the bigger it gets, the more of an investment you have to make in the company's infrastructure. Right. Of course, us a few things that helped out greatly with that. Yeah. Yeah. For one thing, you've got the fact that both Sony and Microsoft gave Twitch a big thumbs up. Right, they announced partnerships that would allow a native app on both of those gaming

platforms to integrate Twitch tv. Right. So, with the case of of PlayStation four, there's a button on the controller where you can start sharing what you're playing. It's a little more complex with Xbox one. Uh. And in both cases it was a feature that was not immediately implemented as soon as the consoles came out, but was implemented a little bit later on the life cycle of those consoles, I say life cycle, and these things haven't even been

out a full year yet. Yeah, it's really interesting to see that they were throwing their support behind this because they could see both Sony and Microsoft could see that this this was a trend that was growing, that people were eager to share their experiences and more people were eager to to eat it all up. So I mean,

I've watched play throughs online. Of course, the playthroughs I watched tend to be done for for comedic purposes, where it's a bunch of guys who are playing who know each other really well, and they're really doing it as a way of entertaining other people, Like that's the whole purpose of it. They're not playing a game competitively against others, which is what a lot of the Twitch TV stuffs for. Not everything, but also you have you have streamed yourself

on Twitch, haven't you? I did. I did for twenty five hours straight. I did a stream of me just playing Minecraft. It was for the Extra Life charity, which raises money for to buy video games and video game systems for kids who are in hospitals and uh, so I was part of this. It was kind of like a Pledge Drive type thing. And for twenty five hours I played and and streamed it live, and I always

had at least one or two people watching. Sometimes I would have you know, a few dozen watching at a time. UH And I even had a thing where for certain levels of contributions, I would build uh monuments within Minecraft, and the more money you made, the bigger and more rare the monument would be, like the materials would be more rare. So some people were incredibly generous and I had to go and find the rarest materials and Minecraft

within twenty five hours and still build it. Like actually, I was like, all, so for the first eighteen hours, I'm just mining and then for the last seven hours I'll be building. So yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. But because of Twitch, I was able to stream it live and people could check in on me and see that I was actually doing this thing that I had said I would do. UM And I also, you know, I got to have an ongoing conversation with

folks through chat. He would chat to me and I would answer that questions live while playing and and kind of keep you motivated while you were doing this ridiculous marathon. Sometime around our number nineteen or twenty, I definitely needed some more motivation. Not to mention coffee. I think that's the wall that they talked about in Marathon ng UM.

In September, Twitch sold an undisclosed stake in the company to investors, raising that twenty million dollars that you mentioned earlier, and a lot of that went to supporting their rollout into the PS four and Xbox one. Yeah. Now, if you're looking at today's numbers, according to Mercury News that this was astounding. Twitch dot tv accounts forty percent of all United States live streaming online. That's more than any

other live streaming site, including ESPN, NBC Sports and YouTube Live. Um. This is all according to Quilt, which is a company that helps networks manage bandwidth demand for video online and announced that they had begun working with Twitch in April. Twitch tv receives more than forty million unique visitors each month, which I think we mentioned before. But yeah, that's a lot.

Like sure, if you look at YouTube, YouTube is getting a billion, okay, but YouTube has Google behind it and is adding a hundred hours of footage every minute, right, This is this is considering that this is something that was a spinoff of another company and has only been around for for less than four full years, it's phenomenal. Yeah, and its users spend an average of a hundred and six minutes per day watching streams average. That is also insane.

That's so not to spoil it, but that's going to come into play when we have our conversation of why the heck would Google wants to spend a billion dollars

on the yes. To put all of this in perspective a little bit, In February, a company called deep Field, which does Internet data analysis for media companies like the Wall Street Journal, Ransom numbers and reported that Twitch accounts for one point eight percent of United States peak internet traffic, which places it fourth overall after Netflix, which stands at

Google and Apple four point three. That also puts it ahead of companies like Hulu, Facebook, and Valve, all of which come in a couple tents of a percentage point lower. That's pretty amazing. I mean, now, granted, these are all different things, right because with Google, the fact that is Google is pretty impressive considering that that's it's text based. Yeah, yeah, it's not just uh, I mean, I guess Google that probably also includes YouTube, so that's probably some video in

there too. But yeah, it's still impressive. The fact that Valve is so far back is also impressive because you're talking about like not just uh, online gaming, but that's a gaming delivery service, you know, if people are buying games on Steam. But um, yeah, still pretty impressive. Well, we're gonna next tackle exactly how this whole system works, but before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back. Let's talk

about how this company actually delivers live streaming. That was Daniel's question, how does it work? Now? A lot of live streaming is using a very similar method, But first it's good to say what it does not do, right, because it's an intrinsically different system than for example, YouTube. Yeah, so YouTube, you've got prerecorded user videos for the most part. I mean, YouTube has some live stuff now, but the

bulk of its business is prerecorded video. So with that, I would, for example, if I were uploading a video, it would upload to YouTube, then it processes and it's stored on YouTube servers actually usually multiple servers. Redundancy. Hey, we said at the same time, we were being redundant. So we're trying to it serve it up from a disk. You know. That's YouTube actually pulls the video from some saved part on some server or servers and serves it up to you when you say I want to watch

this video now. That is completely different from the way live streaming works. And one of the things that made it possible was that, uh, this idea of peering networks. So I'll get to that, but but also to explain how peering networks are different, your basic uh server client relationship is very centralized. You've got a server that has all the information on it, and then you use a client like a browser that then sends a query to the server which says, oh, I know what you want,

you want this and sends it to you. Centralized right right, And that means that if too many people are trying to access that server at the same time, you're going to run into a little bit of lags exactly, which comes down on to your end because the server is going to say, oh, hey, wait a minute, I'm doing this other thing and this other thing, and and it resolves and basically a load bar exactly. Yeah, the same

sort of thing. Like if Lauren had, uh, you know she has she has cookies at her desk, and the entire office comes to her at the same time to get a cookie each It's gonna take a while because, you know, it may be that she has a variety of cookies and we each want a different type of cookies. So Lauren, being Lauren, wants to be fair to everybody

and tries to make sure that this happens. But Lauren, also being Lauren, gets overwhelmed with the fact that a whole bunch of cookie hungry maniacs are approaching her and wigs out. I mean, it just happens. So that would be an issue of client server. So how can you

get around that. Well, if Lauren was able to clone herself and every single version of Lauren had a box of cookies, and all of the box of cookies had identical types of cookies in them, like the whole variety, we could all go to different Lauren's to get our cookies. The interesting thing is that you know, they'd all have exactly the cookie we would want. I want a cookie, I like this bizarre university. Well that's the that's kind

of the nature of appearing. So the other issue here is that if you have the prerecorded material, you can do something called over subscribing bandwidth. Now, that just means that you can serve more data than the network can actually accommodate at any given time. So let's say that I've got a five gigabyte limit on how much data i can push out at any given time, but I've

got seven gigabytes of demand, all right. The way that over subscription works is that I send out messages that tell all the different clients that are trying to access my stuff. Hey, I'm getting to you. Here's some of the information. More of its coming right now, but just just you know what, do a little song and dance for the user. That's when you get the little buffer thing. Right.

So with YouTube, if a video is buffering mainly, that just means that the service has a lot of traffic and it's trying to serve all of that traffic at the same time. So you're getting bits and bits of data that are buffering slowly, so that once you hit a certain threshold, you can push play and watch your

video and everything goes well, yeah, exactly. Hypothetically, exactly. Yeah, if if, if it has buffered enough, you can push play and you can watch the video all the way through because at that point you're getting data faster than the video is completing. Now, anyone who's ever seen video buffer in the middle of a video know that that knows that that doesn't always work, you know. Sometimes it's just one of those things where the playback catches up to the amount of data that's come in and you

have to wait longer. Okay, so how is how is this peering structure different? Alright? So it's decentralized. So instead of having that centralized server that all the different clients are contacting, you have a system, a network architecture where multiple servers are using copies of the same sort of thing, and all of them can take on a part of the work. So instead of one server where you you know, you're just souping it up as fast as it can go so it can work as best as it possibly can,

you distribute it across an entire network. Google actually does this for their search, So for a Google Search query, they have an entire network of servers that work together. That's why if you ever do that Google search and you look and it says it took point zero zero zero zero zero eight three seconds to to answer this query. That's why, because I've got this distributed network, So just think of it as a group of people all taking

some of the load so that no one server is overworked. Now, these servers can be located in different data centers, which could be all the way across the world. They don't have to be co located with anything or next to each other. And because of this, you've got these individual nodes which have this peering architecture that they're they're the peers, so that each individual server is a peer in this peering architecture, and they act as both suppliers and consumers

of resources. So each peer makes part of its computer resources available to the other peers. This is that sharing, that distribution of the load of any given computer request. So this way you can get a bunch of you know, average servers together and network them together and get a better performance than if you just invest in that one

super fast server. It also makes it cheaper because you can just get off the shelf parts to build your servers instead of buying you know, the next ultra fast exactly. So it and Again, this is also what allows you to be have a lot of redundancy because you can you can get a bunch of inexpensive parts as opposed to, well, we blew all our money on this one really fast

machine that can't live up to our expectations. So what happens I mean, because I'm sure that with the number of people who are using this service, what happens if demand exceeds even this capacity? Okay, so if there were no overflow method, you would all get a buffering message at the same time. Because all of these servers are working together. It's this whole It's like it's an all

or nothing kind of situation. Now. Uh, the the peak use of Twitch was something like ten times the amount of the average use, which meant that they had to build a network that could withstand ten times the normal use at least, and in fact, you want to have more than that to have a comfortable buffer. But even

if it goes beyond that. This is something they've learned from their just in TV days, they wanted the ability to have an overflow capacity where they use something called a content delivery network or c d N. Now, this is a specific type of business. It's a distributed system of servers, so again sort of appeering network, but this is kind of appeering network for higher So you would use this if you wanted to create content and you want to be able to distribute it to a wide

audience on a live basis. This is the sort of approach you would want to take. And this is what some companies like Netflix, they depend upon the sort of networks to deliver the stuff that they make. Some companies invest in their own, like twitch tv has its own network, but again, if it exceeds that capacity, they can then say tap the shoulder of the c d N and

say can you take over some of this stuff. Now, for these cases, it does mean that the company, whether it's twitched TV or some other media company, has to pay for those services. You know, it's not a free thing, but it does mean that there's at least a safety

net there. Should Let's say that that there's some huge event that happens on twitch tv that really gets the entire gaming world interested and they all want to watch it at the same time live streaming, then they might need to use that kind of resource because the demand would exceed the capacity. They also developed a load balancing software called Usher to help out a little bit in in high demand situations like that, Yeah, this is really really cool stuff. So Usher is kind of the the

the traffic manager. Right. Usher identifies what requests are and how to fulfill those requests in what in other words, how how many servers it needs to call upon in order to handle the demand that's coming in. Right, So, let's say that I'm going to stream the playing uh, I don't know, some game, like I'm gonna go back and play through some of the Halo games and I'm gonna stream them live. Now, in that case, there's probably

not going to be a huge demand. There aren't that many people who are that interested in watching a bald guy fail miserably at playing Halo. Um until you try, that's true. But I'm assuming that this would not be one that Usher would be like ho Alert the media. So Usher, when getting the message that I'm going to stream this video and then analyzing how much of the resources available we're going to be necessary for to deliver upon that would contact various servers to make sure that

it was covered. And usually we're talking about a capacity that exceeds what it expects for the demand. Now, if it were some uh star Craft two champions that never faced each other before, and they were going to have a tournament style game against each other to determine who is the true champion StarCraft Too. That could be huge, and Usher would then make that determination and contact the various servers that would all be copying the stream so that they could share it up to UH to anyone

that would wanted to watch it. So then you've got all these different factors that come into play that Usher will take into considerations, So not just how popular are the stream is going to be, but how much is it gonna cost to serve up the live video? Because like I said, bandwidth is not necessarily free. And Usher can sit there and look and say which one of

these options is going to be the cheapest. Now, in some cases, like with that StarCraft Too example, cheapest may not be the best response because they want to make sure that their customers, the viewers, are satisfied. So they might say, all right, you know what, We're gonna incur a cost on this, but what we want to do is make sure we have the lowest latency possible so that people who are watching are not experiencing like a thirty second lag behind the action, so then sure can

prioritize on the fly. And it apparently the controls here are incredibly precise so that you can tweak exactly which things are the most important for any given situation. So it's very versatile in that way, which I thought was really really cool. Now every single server in that peer network can actually act as two different things. It can act as an edge server or it can act as

an origin server. So edge servers these are the machines that are actually serving up the video streams that we're watching. So if you log into twitch tv so that you can watch someone else, you're getting that video feed from an edge server. Now, the person who is making that video is sending it to what is called an origin server. That's the that's the machine that's accepting the incoming video,

so it can distribute it to the edge servers. And because all the machines can do either role, it makes it an incredibly flexible approach to delivering live video. And that's why twitch dot tv works. If it had a designated origin server and then designated servers, you would be limited by that capacity. Now, if you could actually visualize all these connections it would look very much like a tree.

So as people start to tune into a particular video stream, you would have more and more branches forming off of the trunk of that tree, so that those servers would be able to deliver up the video most effectively to those users. Because of course users aren't centralized either, right, You could have users from all over the world tuning in for any given video stream. So you want to make sure that you can deliver the video stream the best possible way to any individual user, uh, in the

way that it's going to make financial sense. So I mean, that's why Usher, I thought, is so impressive because it can take all that into account. Now, how is this actually working on the back end? Like what's going on? So with YouTube, you know you're saving two disk, but with Twitch you aren't Twitch and justin TV do not save video to a disk to serve it up. They

save the video stream within the server's memory. So the video that's going to the origin server is saved and its memory, it is making copies of that video stream as it's being generated, sends those copies to the edge servers. Those copies stay in the edge server's memory, which then make a copy of that stream and send it to the clients, the browsers that people are using to watch the video stream. So it's copies and copies and copies. Now that's not to say that they don't save this

information to disk. They do, but that's for archival purposes, so you can go back and watch a video that's been recorded previously. But it's not that that disk saving things is what's coming into play here exactly while you're watching it live. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's also being saved to disk. That's that's

a completely separate thing that's going on. So when you're watching your browser, your your client is sending in a request via HTTP, so hypertext protocol good, all fun stuff. We'll do an episode on it someday, I promise. But anyway, it sends the HTTP request and Usher then accepts the

request because you know, he's a good guy. Uh, then he decided I'm sorry, I'm thinking the software Usher decides which server to connect you to, which edge server you would be connected to, and then the video servers themselves, they're they're very simple. They're just either acting as edge or origin servers, so they're not making this determination at all. That's all the usher software stuff, so and multiple data centers. The data centers are actually located in proximity to major

peering exchanges on the Internet. Now, appearing exchange is not the same thing as peer to peer networks. It's two different concepts. Appearing exchange is a point on the Internet where two major networks end up connecting to each other.

So remember the Internet is a network of networks, right, So when you've got two big networks, like two big Internet service provid witers for example, to have a connection point, the purpose for that is to allow stuff that came from one network to cross over and enter another network.

And these period exchanges their agreements essentially that say, hey, as long as you let the stuff that comes from my network travel across your network, all of the stuff that comes from your network travel across my network, and we're all even, Stephen. Now, this is one of the

points that net neutrality really makes important. They say, this relationship is why we don't have to worry about any particular part of the network holding the rest of the Internet hostage by saying, if you want your traffic to travel on my network, you're gonna have to pay me x amount of money per x amount of data. That would be bad. That would that would I mean it

would be bad. It would break the Internet the way we have it today because you would make an uneven playing ground, and if other networks followed suit, it would just become this thing where you would have your the the stuff you would have access to would be completely dependent upon what originated on your network, who how much, or who wasn't paying who? Yeah. Yeah, So that's anyway

again tangential. But the reason why the peering exchanges are important is that by putting your data centers close to peering exchanges, you have a much closer connection to individual networks. Because this is kind of like the crossroads. If you're able to plant yourself near the crossroads, you can connect to all those different roads that split off from it very easily. It's a very strategic move on the part

of Justin dot tv and Twitch dot tv. So really the only thing left to talk about is the user experience. You've got a browser, You've got a embettable player inside that browser. That's what's handling the incoming video to play it on your your screen. Same sort of thing is like an inbettable YouTube player or blit TV, I mean, any of those inbeatable players are doing the basic same thing. That's just that's just the interface that allows you to watch whatever the data is. So really there's not a

whole lot going on the client side. There's some load balancing stuff that comes from the client side, but not by not a whole lot. Most of it's on the back end. Um and and same thing for the broadcaster. There's not a whole lot going on that the broadcaster has to manage. They basically just turn on their webcam and to use the client and go. Yeah, you might have to have a little extra software depending upon where

your video is coming from, like UH. For example, when I needed to stream when I was playing Minecraft on the PC UH and I needed to stream that online, I had to download another piece of software that would allow me to take the video from the game and upload it to twitch Live. But there are lots of different ways of doing that. And then when you've got things like the Xbox one and the PS four, it's incorporated directly into the consoles through the firmware, so that

one that's taken care of it for you. Right. This ease of usability, I think is why it is in fact so stink and popular. Um and and you know there's that forty five million unique users per month that we mentioned earlier is really is nothing to sneeze. No, that's huge. And and and it's not just that there are a lot of them. It's like the other thing you pointed out, Lauren, it's there's a lot of them that

are watching a really long time. Yeah. They boast that per week as a fall that was more viewers than Breaking Bed, Tosh point O and the NFL preseason combined. That's yeah, I mean that's a significant audience. And you know, again they're really engaged. I mean, if I go to YouTube and I'll watch a video, a lot of those videos tend to be three to ten minutes long. You know, there's some that are longer, and I'll watch those two

depending upon what I'm interested in. You go, maybe a link along the side catches your eye and you watch something else, but probably you're going to click away. Yeah, you don't necessarily stay there for you know, more than one or two videos. If you do, I mean, that's cool too, but that's probably not the average person's experience. You know, like a lot of people watch a YouTube video when it's embedded in something else like a Facebook post.

The typical Twitch user, on the other hand, will stay on the site for hours that that average of a hundred and six minutes per day that we mentioned are earlier. If that's an average, that means there are a lot of people watching way longer than that. Oh right, yeah. Um, And and the demographic that's going to twitch is a really desirable one. The majority is under thirty five. I think it's twenty one to twenty nine is the main, main portion that that's the group of people that you say, hey,

these people buy stuff. Yeah, you've got lots of money and you're probably willing to give it to me. Yeah, so you aren't smart enough yet to know not to know. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But yeah. And it's also largely male, although there's a growing audience and broadcast group of ladies as well. So we're starting to see

that that demographic is slowly changing. I mean, obviously gaming has been very much male domin Yeah, but we're starting to see a lot of females get into it because they find gaming just as awesome of course, And and as as the community changes and as the general standards of the industry change, all of that is hopefully fingers crossed going to change gender lines, right, So it's it's again a growing market, So that's another reason why it's desirable.

But I mean that kind of engagement where you're going to stay focused on something for on average a hundred and six minutes. That is why Google is so interested in in twitch dot tv. Not only is it lives, not only have they done live streaming, and they've done it well, they keep people there. Yeah. Yeah, as of now, YouTube has really only been toying with live streaming. It just opened their YouTube Live services up to the general population in December and they haven't really done I mean,

it hasn't really seen that much traffic. Yeah. The only other thing you can use is like the Google Hangouts, where you can do a hangout broadcast and that ends up broadcasting on YouTube as well, plus on Google Plus and that kind of stuff. Um, and I've used that a couple of times when I've been a guest on other shows. Really I wasn't the one using it, they was. I was participating in it. But yeah, it's still like you said, it's a niche compared to someone like Twitch

dot tv that has just this huge audience. So what would it mean if Google and Twitch joint forces to rule the galaxy. Well, first of all, they might not be able to. On a federal level, The Feds might try to block this deal based on anti competition by saying, hey, Google, you've already got YouTube, You've got you've got user generated video sewn up pretty much. Yeah, you're the biggest content player and you're trying to merge with the biggest content

streamer and that's really not okay. So that's a pity. So that's a possibility. But if it goes through, it would mean access to Twitch users to Google's incredible infrastructure, um therefore improving the video quality and uh and lag times that users are currently experiencing, which I mean Twitch has said themselves that they were not prepared for the kind of growth that they have seen and that it's a fabulous problem to have. But yeah, it's still a problem.

It's still problem. So, like I said, Google has a lot of experience with this kind of peering relationship, using it for other things as well. So h So, in at least on a philosophical level, it's from from architecture, it's a good fit. I don't know how close twitches architecture resembles that of Google on a practical level, but philosophically they are very similar, right, and it's so it could mean really good things there. It could hypothetically mean

more money for the people who are broadcasting. Twitch currently has some four thousand partner casters who who are paid for their casts. Yeah, when you get a certain number of subscribers, you tend to get the attention of Twitch. So let's say that you suddenly hits some new thousand subscribers, which is going to say, hey, we should work together. Yeah,

this could be beneficial for everyone. Um, but Google could possibly do even more for these content creators and if nothing else, integrate more seamlessly with searching with YouTube, increasing both ad revenue and audience participation. Alternately, it could mean changes to the contracts of these professional live streamers, especially considering YouTube's pretty strict policies about copyrighted material and on region locking. Yeah. I mean a thing that a lot

of streamers do is they'll they'll have live music. Well not live music. I don't think that they have a band in their living right, but they have sometimes playing in the background while they are playing a game, and YouTube is not excited about that sort of thing. Well, more importantly, the music in this reason not I'm not

excited about that. They don't necessarily want their music associated with There's also some control issues, like Nintendo historically has been very very protective of their of their video games, and people who have put up, uh YouTube videos of them playing the Nintendo games, a lot of them have experienced takedown because Nintendo said, you know what, we want to have full control of this experience. We don't like the idea of other people being able to do that.

Nintendo started to ease up a little bit on that more recently, but it's traditionally been an issue, and so there's no guarantee that every single game publisher is going to be totally cool. That's a whole that's a whole other issue that I really wish that Nintendo would get with. But back back on on the Google deal side, it could hypothetically get other demographics than just gamers into this

live internet streaming kind of stick. Yeah, it's kind of the whole purpose of justin dot tv in the first place. But Twitch dot tv was the one that took that was the part that took off off of justin dot tv. And now now that people are getting more familiar or aware of this, and also now that Twitch has grown it into a very usable process, yeah, that we might see more people get into this kind of live broadcast platform. Yeah, for for events large and small, for for entertainment, maybe

for for science kind of discovery broadcasts, for news. I've seen a couple of podcasts use this sort of thing as to live stream when they were actually recording, so you could follow along. Now, before any of you ask, that's not gonna happen with us. I think in this in this recording alone, we've stopped to cough about nineteen times. I in fact, had to stop to cough before I

recorded this line. She actually started the line, stopped coughed. Yeah, no, no one, no one wants that we both have congestion issues. So yeah, if you guys were watching live right now, it would be cough cough cough cough cough, three paragraphs worth of information cough cough cough. Yeah, that that how it works. Section took us forever because of me, So yeah,

we will not be doing that. And even when we're feeling well, still not doing it so, but but at any rate, I mean, you know this, this could this could hypothetically change television as we know it. This could be the bridge between network broadcasts and internet viewing. Yeah, we could actually see very re regionalized approaches to stuff as well as you know, more global appeal kind of broadcasts. I've seen some communities do kind of a local news

broadcast for that community. This sort of thing would allow. It's kind of like the public access in that sense, and that it's a live way to communicate information out whether it's entertainment or educational or news or whatever. You can do that on a specific schedule. The other advantageos, of course, it does record the videos, so even if you aren't able to tune in live, you can still watch it, which gives an advantage over other types of

live broadcasts. Sure, and it's it's on demand all the time. It's on the internet. Anyone in the world hypothetically can tune into this. Yeah. So let's say that you move away from your hometown, but you want to keep tabs on it. That could potentially be a way of that happening. Or if one performer becomes very popular and and explodes across you know, into other communities. That's wonderful. We're still waiting make us explode people, you know, in popularity that is, yes, please,

thank you. Most of my atoms where they are. Yeah, I'm pretty fond of where my my constituent atoms happen to be as well. So anyway, that's that's the lowdown on Twitch dot tv. It'll be really interesting to see how this Xbox and PlayStation incorporation ends up, um shaking out. Yeah, and whether or not the Google deal goes through. Of course, all of you guys know possibly by the time this podcast goes live, whether or not that happened, we are still in the dark as of the recording, so I'm

really curious to see how it works out. Yeah. I really think it's an exciting development. Thank you so much Daniel for the question. Yeah. And and also I mean, you know, for for everyone out there who uses Twitch and is worried about the deal, uh, you know, I understand it's it's scary whenever Google buys a property that you are very fond of, especially giving Google's habit of you know, saying huh, I don't know how to do

this anyway, and then shut it down. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, I think that it could very much be an excellent opportunity for many industries. So I think. Uh. The other important thing to take away from this is the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Twitch and being turned down should give all of you Sony PlayStation four owners a big sigh of relief. I mean, I can only imagine if and Google has someone of a vested interest in this. But Google doesn't have its own gaming

console out. You could argue that Android is a platform for games, but it's just one platform. It's not the main purpose for Android. Um. But you know, since they don't have a vested interest necessarily, and whether Microsoft succeeds over Sony, you don't have to worry about Twitch suddenly losing support for something like the PlayStation four, which is something I would legitimately worry about if Microsoft had bought Twitch, I would really be curious to see how they would

resist that urge. So at least that that danger is not on the table anymore. Daniel, thank you again for your suggestion. If you would like to send us a message like Daniel did, well, if you want to be just like Daniel, you need to do the email thing and our email addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. Our handle is tech stuff hs W. Hey, we got a tumbler too, which is awesome. Text Stuff HSW for

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