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What Twitch has in mind to beat the competition

10 months ago babelfish

What Twitch has in mind to beat the competition

The platform acquired by Amazon for about 970 million dollars is trying to rejuvenate itself. Twitch introduces some innovations typical of the most trendy social networks (Instagram and TikTok) and prepares to face a new, aggressive rival who steals the stars from them with multi-million dollar salaries

Grappling with increasingly tight competition (the classic competitors, as we shall see, have been joined by the new Kick platform which, behind the promise of handsome profits, has already ensnared a good number of Twitch stars, responsible for the 400% viewership boom of the last months recorded by the live streaming service inaugurated only in October), the colossus created by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear and then acquired by Amazon in 2014 for about 1 billion dollars (970 million, to be precise) is trying to relaunch through a substantial counteroffensive.

The occasion was the TwitchCon in Paris where the streaming platform, very vertical on video games, announced the arrival of the Stories for October. In short, it is the latest social network to follow the innovations introduced at the time with Snapchat but capable of convincing the general public only after being absorbed by Instagram, the platform par excellence for ephemeral status updates, which disappear 24 hours after publication.

FEEDS AND STORIES

Also on Twitch the Stories will disappear one day after the launch and, the managers assure, they will have to follow the rules of the Twitch Community Guidelines. Like on Google's YouTube, a countdown will also be shown here to advertisements. In this case in the chat box, alerting both the streamer and viewers of an impending announcement.

The peculiarity is that it can be postponed if it occurs at a key moment, a fact that demonstrates a particular sensitivity of the platform to the use of user content, certainly greater than that demonstrated by those who manage television broadcasters, considering how the commercials they break into programs and, above all, films.

A Guest Star upgrade will allow up to five streamers to collaborate and broadcast together, simultaneously, live on their own channel. Another update is the ability for moderators to share comments with each other about why an account was banned. The Recent Alerts feature will be integrated with Shield Mode, so streamers can prevent inappropriate alerts (a hate raid) from appearing by activating this option.

As for the Discovery Feed, it will be structured like a scrolling page in the Twitch app showing small clips from streamers, live or off. In this way, the platform managers let you know, it will be easier for users to come across new streamers, also thanks to AI. Streamers on the other hand will be able to tag their clips as favorites, in order to have priority when they end up in the Discovery Feed stream.

WORRY TO SAY TWITCH COPIES FROM IG AND TT

A set of features that make Twitch more like TikTok? Hard to deny. But from the Amazon platform they try anyway: “We're not building the feeds to compete with TikTok, we don't want to build a platform where people come and consume the feed for an hour a day,” said product VP Jeremy Forrester .

“Many streamers have to actively encourage their Twitch viewers to follow them on other platforms in order to continue communicating with them. We will provide a more comprehensive solution,” Forrester added. “But – he reiterated – we don't want to compete with Instagram on Stories or with TikTok on short videos. We want to help increase streamers' livestreams and help them engage with their communities."

THE RACE OF RIVALS

For the difficult moment that Kick worries Twitch, but in the meantime its growth, witnessed by StreamElements in its State of the Stream report , on data from Streams Charts, is truly undeniable. The analysis calculates the viewers of the platform starting from the number of hours watched. Between January and April 2023, viewership grew by 404%.

MULTIMILLION CHARGE

In addition to the constant flow of new viewers, Kick is attracting quite a few streamers, several from the Twitch universe, including for example Trainwrecks and Adin Ross. The engagement figures are truly stellar: according to the New York Times, the streamer xQc would have signed a two-year "non-exclusive" agreement with the new video streaming platform worth 100 million dollars. In short, the football market in streaming sauce is fought to the end and it explains why if at the end of January there were 9,000 active channels, at the end of April the figure had already grown to 67,000 channels.

However, for the moment, Twitch is showing itself calm, thanks to the results brought home by one of its undisputed stars, Ibai, an eSports commentator of Spanish origin, who in one of the last broadcasts reached 3.4 million simultaneous users, beating all previous records .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cosa-ha-in-mente-twitch-per-battere-la-concorrenza/ on Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:24:18 +0000.