A Brief History of Twitch.tv
Who hasn’t heard about Twitch? It is a live video streaming service. Twitch Interactive operates this service and is a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. Twitch.tv can be termed as Justin.tv’s successor, which was a general-interest streaming platform. Twitch.tv has been active since June 6, 2011, and is the leading live streaming service for video gamers.
Millions of video gamers from all over the world stream their gaming videos on Twitch and earn money. The process of earning money on Twitch is simple. Your fans on Twitch can donate you money if they like your video gaming abilities. The bigger your fanbase, the bigger your chances of earning money. You need to have solid knowledge and top-class playing skills of your favorite game to build your followers list on Twitch.
Now, let’s see how this live streaming service for video gamers came into existence and became the no.1 in the industry.
Initial Years
Justin Kan and Emmett Shear launched Justin.tv in 2007. It was a website with many content categories, but it was the gaming category that grew fast. It showed growth so quickly that the company announced a new website Twitch.tv for its gaming content. Its official launch occurred on June 11, 2011. Since then, Twitch hasn’t looked back and has only been growing.
The number of employees working in the company Justin.tv, Inc was only 80 in June 2013, and today, it bosses around 6,000 employees, and the new name of the company is Twitch Interactive.
When Own3d.tv, the direct competitor of Twitch, was canceled in early 2013, Twitch became the no. 1 e-sports streaming service by quite a significant margin. Its other competitors include Dailymotion and YouTube. Both of these live gaming streaming services tried to stand against Twitch and failed to make an impact.
By February 2014, Twitch had become the 4th largest source of traffic during peak hours in America. It was only behind Netflix, Google, and Apple. Twitch was already making up for 1.8% of the total Internet traffic in the USA during peak hours.
Amazon Subsidiary
Twitch’s parent company renamed itself from Justin.tv, Inc to Twitch Interactive on February 10, 2014. It was a reflection of Twitch’s success over Justin.tv.
It was on August 25, 2014, when Amazon stepped up with an all-cash deal of US$970 million and purchased Twitch Interactive. Earlier on May 18, 2014, reports came that Google had acquired Twitch for US$1 billion under its YouTube subsidiary. Soon, Google pulled out of the deal and made way for Amazon to make a bid and take away Twitch Interactive.
Shear was still the CEO of Twitch Interactive under Amazon. Sara Clemens became the COO of the company in January 2018. Twitch was the third video gaming-related purchase by Amazon in a short time. Before acquiring Twitch, Amazon had already purchased Double Helix Games and Reflexive Entertainment.
It was at the beginning of 2014 when Twitch started to take off. In February 2014, a stream “Twitch Plays Pokemon” gained popularity and became viral.
Soon after acquiring Twitch, Amazon bought Goodgame Agency on December 9, 2014. GoodGame Agency was an organization that was the owner of the e-sports teams Alliance and Evil Geniuses. Someone got unauthorized access to some of Twitch’s users’ information, and therefore, Twitch announced to reset passwords and canceled all connections to YouTube and Twitter accounts.
Special Features Addition
Twitch offered its users a new way of showing the feeling of joy by adding the “Cheering” feature in June 2016. Twitch users had to purchase the Cheering emoticons using the Bits currency so that they can use them to show support for their favorite live streamers. These emoticons were one-of-a-kind donation bills and acted as a way of making money for the channels. Bits was the in-site currency that was available for purchase for all Twitch users via Amazon Payments.
Later that year, Twitch released the Prime Gaming feature. This feature offered the Amazon Prime users exclusive benefits like additional emotes and a free subscription to one streamer per month on Twitch.tv.
Twitch revealed its new logo and updated its website design on September 26, 2019. Twitch also made deals with its top streamers in December 2019. Some of these top streamers were Dr. Lupo, Link, and TimTheTatman.
Conclusion
Twitch is an excellent way of meeting and interacting with gamers from around the world. You can learn a lot about specific games by watching their gameplay via high-profile Twitch channels. The ability to chat with other people watching the same stream makes it a perfect social platform for gamers.
Several streamers make a livable wage on Twitch.tv. If you are a master of any game, you should try TwitchTwitch to build your fan base and make a living out of it.
We hope you enjoyed reading the history of Twitch. You can find more Twitch-related posts on our blog.
Source :- A Brief History of Twitch.tv
Reference:
Stream scheme. 2021. Twitch History — Origins and Culture. [Online]. [March 8 2021]. Available from: https://www.streamscheme.com/twitch-a-brief-overview-and-history/#:~:text=Twitch%20History%20and%20Origins,gaming%20section%20grew%20exceptionally%20fast.&text=Twitch.tv%20was%20purchased%20by,%2C%202014%2C%20for%20%24970%20million.
CNBC. 2019. Twitch created a business around watching video games — here’s how Amazon has changed the service since buying it in 2014. [Online]. [March 8 2021]. Available from: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/history-of-twitch-gaming-livestreaming-and-youtube.html
Wikipedia. 2021. Twitch (service). [Online]. [March 8 2021]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_(service)
