Twitch Switcharoos

gamers called Twitch dot tv. But it's time for an update as since that time a lot has happened, and this year we've seen some big names on Twitch leave, a couple of them return, one of them got banned for some reason. So today I thought we'd really dive into the topic and learn more about Twitch, go into a deeper dive than our previous episode, and learn how a select percentage of users have become millionaires and what's going on with all this moving around or, as I

like to call it, the old twitch a rue. So before there was Twitch, there was Justin dot tv, founded by Justin Kahn. Now, way back in two thousand five, which would be the same year that YouTube would launch, Kahn was working on an interesting experiment in his copious spare time, as he was also pursuing degrees in physics and psychology at Yale, so clearly he's a bit of

a busy body. He had already launched a business called Keiko Software, which was an online calendar program, but that business wasn't really a money maker, and so Con did the sensible thing. He auctioned it off on eBay for reels that brought in a quarter of a million dollars. His next attempt grew out of a project at y Combinator. This company is a startup accelerator, which essentially means it's sir to provide seed money to start up ventures in an effort to get them up and running enough so

that they can then seek out more substantial investors. And it's played a big part in getting some pretty influential companies started, like door Dash, Airbnb, instat cart, and Yes Twitch in the form of justin TV now, Justin TV was a totally different beast from Keiko Software. Con and a small team of developers wanted to create a tool that would allow them to stream live video over the Internet and create something like a reality television stream Big

Brother style. Originally with a camera that was strapped to a baseball cap that Con would wear, so you would get sort of a first person perspective, slightly taller than than Con himself. Perhaps it was a bit self centered, but the idea of life streaming was just starting to take off, you know, the idea of actually video streaming your life, and it was doing that because the technology you would need to do such a thing was coming

into maturation. Webcams were becoming more affordable, and in the United States we were seeing some movement at least in large markets of broadband connectivity rolling out. And it took a couple of years to to build out the service, but Justin DV would launch in two thousand seven. That launch wasn't exactly a home run right away. People were intrigued by the idea of it, but the reality show

broadcasting thing just wasn't winning over very many people. Con and his team were receiving a lot of messages saying that users would like to be able to use the service and stream their own content online, not just watch what they were being provided. So at the time Justin TV was you know, mostly about Justin and his friends.

People were less interested in that, and it took a while, but eventually the company changed its focus from being a source of video streamed content to being a platform for video streaming content, allowing users to create accounts and channels and to stream their own stuff to whomever wanted to watch. One thing a lot of folks wanted to broadcast would be video game play sessions. Now this is not that

surprising for people who aren't into video games. I get that this sounds strange, the idea of watching someone else play a game. I mean, after all, aren't games meant to be played? Why would you watch it? To that, I would say, not all of you play football or baseball or soccer, but a lot of you watch it,

and it's the same sort of thing. It's this idea of you find enjoyment in watching people who are really good at performing that particular sport and enjoying the the feeling you get when you see them do well or see a team you support beat out another team. So this is really not that surprising to me. And I'm also you gotta keep in mind I say this a

lot because Lauren's not on the show anymore. To say it for me, I'm old, So I remember the classic days of the video game arcade, where you would wander among cabinets for games like you know, Elevator Action or Spy Hunter. And while you would spend time playing games, you would also spend a lot of time watching other people playing, either because you were waiting for your own turn at that particular game, or the person was just really dang good at playing that game and you were

just watching because you were impressed. I remember one afternoon at a Goldmine arcade where I stood for nearly twenty minutes watching a kid play through all of Dragons Lair, which was a LaserDisc based game that featured full hand drawn animation in it. So while games were really made for playing, lots of folks just really enjoyed watching them.

But streaming video games presented other challenges. Twitch was set up to stream from a camera source like a webcam, streaming from another video source like a video game, let alone allowing for arrangements like a webcam picture overlaid on part of that video source just wasn't supported Natively, Folks were jerry rigging systems to kind of make it happen.

The team Adjuin TV considered it emergent behavior, and so Con and his team hired on specialists who could help video game streamers set up their systems to allow for that kind of thing. To stream content from a video game onto the service, users needed to rely on third party software in those early days, and for the most

part today they still do. Several different developers had options available, and one early one that remains popular to this day is open Broadcasting Software or oh b s. These programs typically operate as a full mixing and broadcasting service and allows users to set up stuff like the audio levels for their video stream incorporate the microphone and thus you can set the audio levels for your mike in comparison

to the video game. Obviously want your mike to be slightly louder than the video games so people can hear you over the sounds of the game. UH support for things like webcams and transitions and video effects and more. And for years this was really the only way streamers could work with streaming services, and it wasn't always a

user friendly or intuitive experience. Getting started could be a little bit intimidating as there were lots of settings to manage, but the determined gamers who wanted to stream found ways to make it work. As the various types of broadcasting software evolved and improved and added features. Over time, between two thousand seven, when justin TV launched and two thousand eleven, when it would spin off Twitch dot tv, video game

streaming really began to come into its own. There was a particular focus on sports, that is, on games that had an elite level of competitors who could play against each other informal organized tournaments, often with significant cash prizes for the winners. Players could make their own Twitch channels, and people could watch as these players would practice their strats and their skills, honing their techniques while training for

the next tournament. And maybe that sounds weird to those of you who don't game, but it really is a show of how play at that level is truly incredible. I mean, these these players can see faster than I can. They will see details and and act on them faster than I can even register what is happening. It's phenomenal to me. Emmett Sheer, who served as the chief Technology officer of Justin TV, saw that this trend was going and he worked really hard to add more support for

video game streaming. Sheer himself had been a competitive StarCraft two player and he really recognized what was going on. So as the team to a more features to help gamers back on justin TV, it became clear that what was really needed was a separate streaming platform. Gaming was

starting to dominate the streams over at justin TV. It was actually hard to find the other stuff there, So the team decided that the right thing to do would be to spin off a separate streaming service specifically intended to support video games streaming from the get go, and in two thousand eleven, that's how Twitch dot tv was born. It was done to allow some of the stuff on justin TV a little more breathing room, because it was

just getting avalanched by all this video game content. In July two eleven, one month after the service had launched, Twitch was ready to announce the launch of its Partner program. The partner program represented a professional level of streamer, someone who could actually make money off of streaming their video gameplay, whereas most people couldn't really do that dire rectally through

Twitch at that time. If you were a streamer and you wanted to make money, you had few options available to you in those days, as the Partner program had

some really high requirements in those early days. Keeping in mind this is when the service was less than a year old, so to qualify, a Twitch streamer had to have either five hundred minimum concurrent viewers on average, three hundred thousand channel views and at least one thousand followers, or you can meet one of three other tougher requirements.

You could have an average of at least one thousand viewers at any given time, you could have a minimum of eight hundred thousand channel views or at least four thousand followers. Now, over time, what was required to be considered for you to make the status a partner would change and at times became less obvious to the average person. Twitch partners could earn a share of revenue that was generated on their streams, So to which is revenue model

was largely on advertising. It was video ads that would run his pre role in channels or sometimes an overlay AD or sometimes even a mid role AD, and that was typically how Twitch was making its money. As a revenue generation kind of strategy, Twitch dot tv would handle all the ad sales arrangements and partners would get a percentage of all the revenue generated on their channel on a monthly basis, so once a month you would get

paid out. The more folks who are watching ads on your stream, the more money you would make that month. Partners would also get access to new Twitch tools and features before the rest of Twitch users would. So if you were streaming on Twitch you were not a partner, then you might see partner streamers using tools that were not available to you, and it sometimes can seem a

little unfair. At the same time, the people who are making partner they were kind of acting almost as power beta testers for these different Twitch tools and finding ways of making them really useful, and then those tools might later be rolled out to a larger group of users. Not at some point, though I couldn't find exactly when. I couldn't find a definitive source that that really laid this out. Twitch partners also got the ability to offer

subscriptions to followers. Now on Twitch you can follow an account for free. You can sort of, you know, hit a little follow thing, and that makes it easier for you to see when your favorite streamers are active. Whenever you log into Twitch, you would see it, maybe on the landing page, so it made it much simpler. Subscriptions are a way for users to actually support the streamers

they like to watch financially. So when they do that, subscribers get access to a few bells and whistles, which mostly play out in the chat room for those subscribe channels, So as subscriber might have a particular badge next to their user handle to designate that they are at a certain level of subscription for that particular streamer, or they might have access to a collection of special emote commands

that the average person doesn't have. The original subscription fee in the United States was four dollars ninety nine cents

per month. Twitch took about half of that technically just less than half, like two dollars forty nine cents, and the streamer would get the other two dollars and fifty cents of each of those subscriptions per month, and eventually Twitch would increase the options to also uh to other levels of subscription, so you still had the four dollars nine cents per month as the base level, but users could opt to subscribe at nine dollars nine cents a

month or twenty four dollars and ninety nine cents per month. At those higher levels, users would get access to additional emotes and bells and whistles, so it's not like it was an enormous change in their experience, but they would have the knowledge that they were giving more support to

those particular streamers. In addition, partners would get access to more emote slots as they racked up more subscribers, so it incentivized partners to try and get that number up, not just for the money, but to create more reasons to convince people to join and become subscribers. It was a sort of a feedback loop. But again this was all originally restricted to official Twitch partners, which represented a

tiny percentage of the overall streamers on the platform. So if you wanted to make money off your streaming but you did not meet twitches requirements, your only other options were to find ways to benefit indirectly from your streaming, such as by offering merchandise or setting up an affiliate

program through an online in store. So you would provide a special link to your viewers and you'd say, if you want to buy this chair that I have, you know, the same kind of chair, then follow this link and you can buy it there, and then the streamer gets a certain amount of money from every purchase that's made through that specific link. It's a little kick back to the streamer, and all of this is on the up and top. I mean, this is always where it's supposed

to be. You're supposed to communicate that to the viewers, saying if you use this, then you help support the channel. I get a little bit every time you guys get it, and then you get the thing that you wanted in the first place and no extra cost to you. You can also try and get sponsorships from various companies. There are a couple of other ways that you could monetize your your streaming even if you weren't a partner, but

it always requires a lot of hustle. The Twitch management team held a couple of different rounds of investment funding, one in two thousand twelve and an other in two thousand thirteen, and together those two rounds brought in about thirty five million dollars of investment. And this is one of those instances where if you could travel through time, you might join those investors. That there's what we call foreshadowing.

Interesting side note. While Twitch dot tv would go on to become monumentally successful and profitable, Justin TV didn't fare quite as well. In February two fourteen, the parent company that was Justin TV that oversaw both the Justin TV service and Twitch TV rebranded as Twitch. So the spinoff has now become the master. And in August that year,

Justin TV shut down entirely. It had become clear the video game streaming was the winner here and the more generic life streaming service was just not taking off at a level where it merited the amount of attention that was required to run it. So they cut their losses, they shut it down, and they really focused on Twitch. Also back in February two fourteen was the birth of

a great social experiment called Twitch plays Pokemon. So Pokemon, in case you're not familiar, is a game series where you play as a Pokemon trainer and Pokemon is short for pocket monsters, So you go around collecting and training monsters to do battle on your behalf against other monsters. Anyway, not not important. This Twitch channel create an experiment which viewers could influence what happened in a specific Pokemon game

called Pokemon Read. A bot was playing the game, and the viewers could type in commands and the video streams chat to make the bot do stuff, and because the game is turn based, the bot would wait for the next input and then act on it. As you might imagine, this quickly resulted in true chaos. As people discovered the channel, users would flood the chat with commands in an attempt to to be the one to guide the Pokemon playing bought to do a specific action, or sometimes just to

cause trouble. So within a month the experiment had grown large enough that the channel's administrators changed things up a little bit. They switched from a yell commands at the

bot mode to vote for anarchy or democracy. Anarchy was the old style of play in which a bot would take all the commands in the order that they were received and then execute on them in turn, and that resulted in a lot of chaos, and sometimes it meant you would spend hours watching the bot navigate the same menu due to all the different inputs it had received.

Democracy took a different approach. The bot would pause between actions and players could vote on what happened next, and they would have about twenty seconds to cast their vote. Then the bot would look at all the votes and whichever one one it would perform that action. Now I could do a whole episode about the Twitch plays Pokemon experiment. The interesting stuff really doesn't have that much to do

with the game or its mechanics. Instead had a lot to do with how people find ways to game systems and an effort to achieve specific goals. If you look at the experiment as a whole, you start to see stuff that might remind you of novels like Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm. But maybe that's best say for a different type of podcast, since the technical stuff was really just an enabler. Anyway, Twitch plays Pokemon really got the streaming service a lot of attention, and who

boy did that pay off. Twitches performance was gaining attention, and it would soon lead to a couple of big fish in the tech world to explore acquisition opportunities. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. So rumors were running wild at Google in the form of YouTube was sniffing around Twitch for a possible acquisition. YouTube was already the de facto go to for online prerecorded video.

The site was aiming to create the same space for live streaming video, and while the company was rolling out some live streaming capabilities, the user base was already over at Twitch. Meanwhile, Twitch was actually eliminating one major feature that upsets some of its users. In early August, the company began to delete archived broadcast recordings that were more than two weeks old. Partners got a little bit more breathing room. They could hold onto their broadcast recordings for

two months. Oh and I didn't really cover this, but in the company introduced a paid subscription tier for users called Turbo. This wasn't a subscription to a specific streamer, but to Twitch itself, So for nine dollars a month, users could log into their paid subscription version of Twitch, where they would be able to skip all pre roll

and overlay ads. They also got access to more chat features, which is really that's the only features that viewers get access to on Twitch if you're not actually streaming stuff anyway. Turbo subscribers could also have their broadcast recording stick around

for two months. Hit Box TV, a competitor to Twitch that launched in attempted to use twitches announcement about clearing out the archives is kind of a leverage of weapon, saying that Twitch was out of touch with its user base, but Twitch already had the momentum and was really just getting started. Ultimately, YouTube would not be the company to scoop up Twitch. Instead, Amazon came in with a nearly billion dollar offer of its own, and they bought the company.

Twitch would become an Amazon owned business. Kevin Lynn, who was a co founder of Twitch and the chief operating officer, later described the experience as frightening at east at first. As someone who has been working in the same job since two thousand seven but has gone through five different changes in corporate ownership, I rock that by the end of two thousand fourteen, Twitch had made an acquisition of its own. The company purchased Good Game Agency, not to

be confused with Good Game Studios. That's the company out of Hamburg, Germany. Good Game Agency grew out of Philadelphia when CEO and founder Alex Garfield got interested in East sports and competitive gaming and gradually became more involved in the scene, ultimately stepping in to help a professional team called Evil Geniuses after the team had been essentially swindled

by a crooked manager. The agency would become a big player in East Sports, ultimately acting as the owners of not just Evil Geniuses but another team called Alliance, as well as holding its own tournaments. Garfield wrote a long and fantastic blog is describing his decision to align with Twitch. That really drove home his love for competitive gaming and the belief that this would be a great relationship, a belief that ultimately probably didn't hold true. Two years later,

Garfield would leave Twitch and Good Gain. In August two thousand and sixteen, he announced that the company and the E sports teams had changed his life, but it was time for him to move on. Not long after, Twitch would shut down Good Game Agency. Good Game employees were now direct Twitch employees. Twitch later would hand over the management for both Evil Geniuses and the Alliance professional teams to the players on those teams and divested the company

of team ownership. Today, Garfield is the head of a company called pop Dog and e sports streaming service that seems to me to be a bit of a rebuttal of the way streaming is handled on services like Twitch and YouTube, and he's also remained vocal critic of how the new owners of Evil Geniuses have handled that brand. But let's move back to Twitch. In two thousand fifteen, Twitch did something really useful for streamers, and I'm really

being totally serious about this. The company created a royalty free music library that streamers could use the tracks in that library were cleared for streaming. So if you want to play music on your stream, let let's say you've got a startup screen. You haven't actually started playing yet. You wanted to run your stream for a little bit, get some viewers, and then jump in. You can have

some music playing in the background. Or maybe you wanted music underlying whatever it was you were actually doing on the stream. You could do it with this library and not worry about getting a copyright strike against you. And this is a big deal. Music licensing is hard y'all. As a peek behind the curtain, I work for I Heart Radio, which is in the business of broadcasting content like music. I mean, they have hundreds of radio stations.

But even in podcasting, and podcasting is different than broadcast because in a podcast, you can go back to a specific episode whenever you like. It's like having a copy of that content. So the licensing requirements for podcasting are a bit wonky. It's not like live radio where you hear it and then it's gone. Having access to a tool like Royalty Free Music is pun intended a game changer.

The service began to experiment a bit with streaming stuff outside the world of video games, In February two fifteen, Twitch began streaming poker games. I'm sure folks who have been familiar with the path of ESPN we're worried about that, But the rest of us were worried the following month when reports broke that hackers had managed to breach twitches

security and get access to user information. The initial investigations seemed to indicate that user names and encrypted passwords were lead, but that the financial information that users had with the site had remained safe. As a result, all users were required to change their passwords, while the leaked passwords were still protected by encryption. Encryption can be broken if you

have enough time and enough processing power. Users were also made aware that the hack had leaked some personal information, such as the users names and birth dates and addresses not great. In the summer of one year, after YouTube had been eyeing Twitch for a possible acquisition, we saw the launch of YouTube Gaming, later just known as YouTube Live.

This was launched as a direct competitor to Twitch. Streamers had options when it came to services, but Twitch had a huge head start of several years and had gathered a lot of the live streaming audience. YouTube Gaming despite having the incredible power of YouTube behind It didn't have as strong an association with live streaming as Twitch had, so for some creators it just made more sense to move over to YouTube from Twitch because there wasn't really

any risk there. They didn't have a huge following or anything. But for others, sticking with the established service made the most sense, particularly partners who had a lucrative arrangement with Twitch. YouTube does offer some things that Twitch doesn't, such as archiving past streams indefinitely. While Twitch was clearing house after fourteen days or two months, for partners, those recorded streams stay with YouTube forever. Like Twitch, YouTube offers the ability

for viewers to support streamers by joining the channel. Here's here's a complicated thing. See YouTube already uses the word subscribe to mean follow, so you can follow a specific creator by subscribing for free, and that makes the terminology confusing, because at Twitch, you follow a creator for free, you pay to subscribe to a streamer. On YouTube, you subscribe to a streamer for free, but you pay to join a channel's membership. So it's the same stuff on either service.

It's just the terminology is overlapping and different. One thing that Twitch had going for its favor was its relationship with Amazon. Amazon Prime members can subscribe to one channel on Twitch as part of their Prime membership. There's no extra cost to the Prime membership holder, but it helps support the Twitch creator. In October two thousand fifteen, Twitch began to expand its scope and opened up a new

category of live streams called Creative. These dreams were meant to showcase creative hobbies and endeavors, and Twitch launched the channels with a marathon of Bob Ross painting videos So many Happy Little Trees. A year later, the Side did something similar would introduced a food category of streaming services, broadcasting a marathon of cooking shows hosted by Julia Child. By the end of we started to see the sort of jockeying for talent has been a big part of

recent news. A service called Major League Gaming made an offer to a professional Twitch streamer who goes by the handle aid Shot, and the deal would mean maid Shot would agree to stream exclusively on the Major League Gaming service, leaving Twitch behind, but streamers Liken aid Shot would learn a pretty tough lesson, which is that you could get a big initial payout, but unless your audience makes the move with you, You're not guaranteed much longevity in your

success on the new platform. This is a lesson that a lot of people would learn the hard way over the following years, and on the flip side, it was also a lesson for the various streaming services. Sometimes dropping an enormous amount of money on an exclusivity deal doesn't result in a big boost in users in the long term. Nate Shot, as it turns out, would return to Twitch in two thousand sixteen. Meanwhile, another big player was getting

ready to enter the space. Microsoft, as the powerhouse behind the Windows operating system and the Xbox series of video game consoles, wanted a piece of the action. The company began to look around for a potential acquisition to build out its capabilities, and their sites fell on a service called Beam. Beam had started in Seattle, and it introduced

a new factor into streaming, that of interactivity. While Twitches interactivity was mostly limited to chat between viewers and streamers, apart from some notable exceptions like the viewer controlled bot in Twitch plays Pokemon, Beam included tools that would let viewers actually affect the streamers gameplay experience. According to a press release from August Quote. With Beam, you don't just watch your favorite streamer play, you play along with them.

You can give them new challenges and make real time choices that affect their gameplay, from tools selection, two quests to movement, all through simple visual controls end quote. Initially, the focus was really on incorporating Beam into the Xbox experience, which didn't have as much of an overlap with Twitch. While it was entirely possible to stream console games to Twitch, the majority of streams tended to be from PC based games, so there was a time when these services didn't have

an enormous amount of overlap. But in Microsoft rebranded the Beam service, Beam became Mixer. According to Microsoft, the reason for this name change was one of necessity. There are regions in the world where the name Beam was already in use for a different service, and so Microsoft needed a name that it could use in different regions, preferably a name that could still be used all around the world, rather than, you know, have a name that's different for

every single territory. The service also included some new features and prepared itself to make some big moves against Twitch. And so we're getting to a point where some of the drama that's happened more recently has begun to unfold. I'll explain more when we come back, but first let's take another quick break in Twitch expanded, who could monetize

live streaming by launching the Twitch Affiliate program. Not to be confused by the store affiliate monetization strategy that I mentioned earlier, where you would get, you know, a special link people could follow, and then you would get you know, a little kickback every time people use that link. Instead, the Twitch Affiliate program was a sort of step between Twitch partner and casual Twitch user. Twitch would choose channels

to invite into the program. You couldn't apply for it, They would choose you, and to qualify, your channel needed to have at least five hundred total minutes broadcast in the last thirty days, at least seven unique broadcast days in the last thirty days, an average of three concurrent viewers or more over the last thirty days, and at

least fifty followers. Not first, the primary way affiliate members could make money off of streaming was through a system called bits, which are essentially a form of in app currency that you use to tip streamers. You buy this virtual currency with real money. Then you use the virtual bits to cheer on your favorite streamers, you can tip them. It keeps track of the biggest tippers during a stream. And yes, I do think this is largely in an effort to obvious skate how much money is going to

each person and to Twitch allah Disney Bucks. But that's neither here nor there. By January nineteen, Twitch was boasting more than three million streamers monthly, with live stream tournaments bringing in as many as one hundred million viewers, eclipsing most quote unquote real sporting events. It was hitting a monthly average of nearly one billion hours of total watch

time on the site. It had a solid place in the top ten sites that served as a source for video content online, Amazon Prime being another in the top ten, so Amazon was actually holding two places in the top ten simultaneously. And along the way, Twitch had to deal with some of the stuff that comes along with the territory of providing a live streaming platform, mostly in the form of dealing with people who were violating terms of service.

Some people were being too vulgar or explicit, although you've got to go pretty far to to to really trip twitches warning flags. Some were engaging in jackass like displays of self harm, which was right up against Twitch's terms of service. A few were caught out being frauds or cheats. There was a gambling scandal back in the day. There's been some scandals of of people who have cheated on games, like they were using a view bot as opposed to

actually playing a game. UH. There's one case where a person was faking having a real life disability in order to drum up sympathy and support, and UH, in the middle of a game, got angry and accidentally revealed that that disability was in fact fake. There are numerous stories along these lines, and every time one would pop up, Twitch would have to crack down a little harder on the rules. And some of the bands that have been placed over people over the years have since been reversed.

Some of them were just temporary to begin with, but a few do remain permanent. Making matters more complicated is that the rules are somewhat vaguely defined. For example, Twitch has a rule against streamers dressing suggestively or provocatively. You know, you're not supposed to be showing too much skin on camera, but there's no real standard that defines what this practically means, and sometimes you'll see one channel get banned for that sort of activity, while other channels that seem to be

just as guilty keep on going. And this has been a continuing source of frustration for people who are in the streaming space, and at the same time, Twitch, like many companies online or off, is having to reckon with the massive problem of sexual harassment and misconduct. This is something that across the board has been a long time coming, as sexual harassment and all industries has been a huge problem. I don't know if it's more prevalent in the world

of gaming, but it can certainly be more overt. And the fact that gaming has traditionally catered primarily to straight males and many games have perpetuated a fairly skewed point of view when it comes to sexism that does not help things. In the summer of a number of streamers became the focus of allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.

Twitch responded with a message that said it was looking into the accounts of those who had been involved in those allegations and was taking each and every one of those very seriously. In addition, some people allege that the company itself had taken a rather hands off approach to particularly popular streamers, most notably those who are under contract with Twitch, the implication being that if streamers are good for business, then they can be exempt from the rules.

That is not a good look, and the story gets super ugly, and it's still unfolding as I record this episode. But one thing I can say is that some former vice presidents of Twitch have confirmed some of those stories, indicating that this is a deep problem with the company culture, and honestly, it makes me think a bit about Uber and how that company was really in a bad place

for a long time. As for other cases that don't involve sexual harassment or misconduct, it's extremely difficult to stand out on a platform like Twitch, just as it is hard to stand out in places like YouTube or heck, in podcasts, the flood of content means you're competing against a lot of other folks for viewing time from your fans, and so people try lots of different things in order to get those viewers, or they have certain personalities that

attract viewers, and then the streamers will dial that personality up to eleven, kind of like a professional wrestler would, And this means some streamers push the envelope a little harder than others. It becomes part of their persona and the attraction of their channels, But it also risks the great Twitch ban hammer, either on a temporary or a

permanent basis. If you were to look at an exhaustive list of the various bands of high profile streamers, you're likely gonna get upset, not necessarily for the decision to ban some folks. Often those decisions are extremely well warranted, but you might get upset because there are a lot of times where Twitch hasn't banned someone for behaving really awfully, so that there's a real inconsistency with banning, and that

is a big problem. And making that worse is that there are times when Twitch will ban someone and then the reason for the ban is never disclosed. Now, it's possible that at least in some of those cases, Twitch has reached out to streamers and explain the reason for the band, and then the streamers subsequently decide not to share that with their public. But you hear this often enough to get the feeling that at least sometimes accounts get and for a blanket quote unquote violation of policies

kind of statement. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this is with the popular streamer Doctor Disrespect, a guy beam. Disrespect had been banned before, most notably when he and his cameraman ducked into a restroom at E three during a live stream, but that ban was made temporary. Disrespect had signed an exclusive multi year contract with Twitch early in but in June of this year, his account was suddenly removed. There was a live stream in June where

Disrespect was live on camera. He got a message on his phone, he looked at it, and then he rapidly had a massive change of attitude and he ended the stream shortly afterward. And that fueled a lot of speculation as to what was possibly going on, like did he did he get shut down live on camera? He violated his exclusivity agreement? Was he involved in a case of sexual harassment or misconduct? Or was it something else? Disrespect

wasn't really talking and neither was Twitch. And as I record this, the reason for Disrespects ban remains a mystery outside of Twitch, and the Doctor himself claims he doesn't know why he was removed from the platform. He has since moved over to streaming on YouTube. To this day, streamers on Twitch aren't supposed to play in games with

disrespect on their team. Now they can't play against him if they're in a game and they're matched up against him, but they're also not supposed to have his audio on their streams. That's been something that has jumped up recently too and has been a bit of a controversy. Now. Twitch holding a dominant position in the market also meant it was the prime target for everyone else, and we

started to see that really unfold in twenty nineteen. In August twenty nineteen, professional streamer Tyler Blevins, whose best known by his online handle Ninja, signed an exclusive streaming deal with Microsoft's Mixer service. It's kind of hard to explain to someone unfamiliar with the sports how big a deal this was. Ninja is a superstar. He's played many games, but he's perhaps best known for his Fortnite play. He's participated in numerous tournaments along the way, he's been a

commentator on tournaments. Fortnite has been one of the most popular games on the Twitch streaming service. Since Fortnite introduced the Battle Royal mode, took a spot from a former Battle Royal darling called pub g and Ninja is a big enough deal that he has a professional management team to help him negotiate stuff like merchandising deals and sponsorships and exclusivity agreements, and so he and his team were able to secure a pretty sweet deal with Microsoft. In return,

Ninja would stream exclusively on Mixer. Twitch meanwhile struggled to figure out what to do with Ninja's door channel. It had millions of followers. The company made the decision to direct the channel to promote other active channels in the Fortnite space, but that decision allowed someone else to game the system. Someone created a streaming channel that was streaming explicit sexual video content. This person inflated the number of viewers on that channel, and they tagged the channel as

a Fortnight stream, and all the stuff was automated. So Twitch looks and sees that there's this Fortnite stream that has an enormous number of viewers, And because Ninja's dormant channel was automatically promoting Fortnite streams that were ranking really well, the Ninja channel began to display the feed from this this channel that was just showing explicit sexual content. Ninja was understandably upset. He had spent so much time building

that brand. He wasn't allowed to go back and manage his channel because of his exclusivity agreement, and he felt that it was his name and reputation being drawn through the mud. Twitch management hastily banned the offending channel and apologized, and people began to wonder if maybe there need to be a better system to moderate channels on Twitch. Ninja's departure wasn't the only one. A couple of months after he left, another gamer known as Shroud followed suit and

also signed an exclusive deal with Mixer. Shroud had more than seven million followers on Twitch when he did so. Clearly Microsoft was banking on having top streamers pull enough audience from Twitch in order to give Mixer a boost. And also, Shroud happens to have the same management company as Ninja. It's a company called Loaded, which I'm sure is just a coincidence. Other prominent streamers soon joined the ranks.

King Gothalian and Ewalk were also too that made the move from Twitch to to Mixer, but it ended up not being a very long arrangement. While Ninja and Shroud signed exclusivity agreements for presumably a ton of cash, a princely sum at the very least, Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Mixer in the summer of the company announced in June that Mixer would shut down on July

that existing partners would be moved over to Facebook Gaming. Now, this did not go over so well with a lot of folks on Mixer, and it led to some jibes from streamers on other platforms. For people like Shroud and Ninja, there were questions of what move would make the most financial sense. But for lots of other people who spent time and effort building a following on Mixer, it was

a much more serious matter. They had spent years creating a following, and there was no guarantee they were going to be able to bring that audience with them, either to Facebook Gaming or some other platform. For the big superstars, this was sort of a bump in the road, But for a lot of streamers who depended upon Mixer as where they built their career, it was much more than that.

The fact that Microsoft didn't reach out to streamers first, but rather published this decision on Twitter in a series of public tweets was salt in the wound, because that's how people were learning about it, was the fact that it was being published on Twitter. But this is an episode about Twitch, not Mixer. So I'll go back to Twitch. But one day I'll have to do a full story of the development of Beam all the way to the shuttering of Mixer, because that tale has more than its

share of dark scandals and bad decisions. Rumors started popping up that perhaps Disrespect, Shroud, and Ninja would form their own streaming service, separate from all the established companies. Now ultimately that proved to be pure speculation, or at the very least, if it ever had been a plan. It didn't pan out that way. Ninja briefly switched over to YouTube Live before he signed another multi year exclusive agreement

with Twitch, and so he has returned back home. Shroud has done the same, also signing a multi year agreement with exclusive streaming to Twitch. Dr Disrespect remains banned from the platform, so he is not doing that. As I wrap up these notes, I can give you a glimpse into some of the stats on Twitch. There are slightly more than three million viewers who are live on the service as I write this, watching more than nine thousand channels.

The number of hours of content watched on twitch tv in August twenty twenty was one point six billion hours of content. Holy cow, that is equivalent to one thousand, five hundred twenty seven years. That's the amount of time spent by people watching streams on Twitch in August. The all time peak and viewers at one time over the last week was just over six million people. Now, it's no big surprise, but the average number of viewers and hours of viewing has been on the rise since the

outbreak of COVID nineteen. For those of you out there who want to set up a Twitch stream, it does require a few things. If you want to do it really well, you need a pretty beefy computer, not just to play games, but to push out the streamed content to the Internet. Some streamers prefer to actually use a two PC set up, one PC dedicated to gaming and the second one just dedicated to handling the encoding and streaming of content part. You probably want a decent webcam

or better, you want a good microphone. You want to become familiar with whatever broadcasting software you want to use, like oh b S, so that you can, you know, have like a nice looking overlay and some transitions and stuff that complements your channel. You gotta have good lighting. You want your background to look nice. It's not the hardest stuff in the world to learn, but it does

represent a very or two entry. On top of all that, even if you're a super good gamer and you set up your system well, you've got good screen presence, you still got to gather an audience. And like I said, getting noticed is hard. It's not impossible, but it is challenging, even for someone who might be well known in some

other form of media. Me And it's also a good idea to take a really critical view of whatever platform you're thinking of using, whether it's Twitch or something else, because you don't want to hit your wagon to a service that behaves in a way that you find objectionable. You don't want to work for a boss that does stuff that you find upsetting. You want to try and

find a platform that fits your philosophy. If you're not bothered by stuff that one platform is doing, and you don't think it's necessarily wrong or anything, there's nothing wrong with joining that service, but do take a critical look before you start making decisions. I'm sure that I'll do a lot more up pisodes related to Twitch. While back, I even used to stream podcasting as I would record episodes.

Maybe I'll do that again in future episodes. Since I'm doing this from home, I could set up a Twitch stream and actually stream my recording sessions. You guys could hear how many times I have to take pauses or how many times I make mistakes. It's a lot. You don't get to hear it in the final episodes because Tari is so awesome, but it's a lot. I would need to install some software in order to make that happen.

I haven't done that for this episode. So of this episode about streaming did not stream live, but maybe next time. I'll keep you guys posted in the meantime. If you have any suggestions for future topics I should cover in tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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