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Fortnite users can now livestream gameplay to Houseparty’s social video app
Houseparty, the social video app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has just announced a major new step in terms of integrating these two properties: the company says it will now allow gamers to livestream their Fortnite gameplay directly into Houseparty. The feature works to allow users to share their gameplay with up to nine other friends in a Houseparty room.
The addition follows Houseparty’s launch of a “Fortnite Mode” last November, which added a video chat feature to Fortnite where players could see live feeds from their friends while gaming, powered by Houseparty. Today’s launch is something of a reverse of that, as it lets players stream the game to friends, which is viewable inside Houseparty itself. This allows the users’ friends — including those who may not be Fortnite gamers themselves — to watch and and interact with the player.
To use the new feature, the Fortnite player will need to have enabled Fortnite Mode Streaming and be connected to Houseparty. When they begin to stream their gameplay, their friends on Houseparty will be notified that their game feeds are now available to watch.
The Fortnite player can then see who is watching their stream via a graphic overlaid on their screen which shows their “watcher count.” This is represented by a little eye icon in the middle-left of the screen for the gamer, while Houseparty users will see the eye icon in the top-left of their video screen.
During the livestream, the player and their friends can watch and chat, as usual.
If the Fortnite player doesn’t want to livestream their gameplay, they can change this at any time from a setting inside Fortnite without losing their ability to use the video chat feature. Parents and guardians can also turn on and off Fortnite Mode and other privacy features inside Fortnite’s settings. The company notes that personal info will be blocked from streams, including payments information. However, The Lobby, your menus and your gameplay can all be streamed when Fortnite Mode is enabled.
Houseparty first gained traction as a way for friends to virtually “hang out” online through video chat, but ultimately sold to Epic Games shortly after the gaming giant raised a massive $1.25 billion round. So far, Houseparty hasn’t given up on its other social features, even as it has become more closely integrated with Fortnite. The launch of the new feature creates potential for Houseparty to capture some of the more casual livestreaming that today takes place on other platforms, like Twitch, Facebook or YouTube, where users aren’t necessarily streaming for fans, but rather for friends.
The company says the new feature won’t offer a record function for later exporting these livestreams for publishing elsewhere, but notes that Fortnite already allows the ability to save replays.
At launch, Fortnite gameplay integration with Houseparty is available across PC and PlayStation only (PS4 and PS5). Epic Games didn’t say if or when other platforms would be supported. Houseparty users on iOS, Android and Chrome will be able to watch the livestreams.
The previously launched video chat feature in Fortnite was also supported on PCs and PlayStations.
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Live-streaming platform BoxCast raises $20M
BoxCast, a Cleveland-based company aiming to make it easy to live stream any event, has raised $20 million in Series A funding.
Co-founder and CEO Gordon Daily said that when the company first launched in 2013, “streaming wasn’t something that everyone understood,” and you needed professional help to live stream anything. BoxCast is supposed to make that process accessible to anyone.
The company has created several different video encoder devices, but Daily said the “small box” is just a one piece of BoxCast platform, which is designed to cover all your live-streaming needs, with support for 1080p broadcasting; streaming to Facebook Live, YouTube and your own website; analytics and more — plus there are add-ons like automatic scoreboard displays and event ticketing.
Pricing starts at $99 per month for the “essential” streaming plan, plus $399 for a BoxCast encoder. (You can also just stream from an iOS device.)
And it’s no surprise that 2020 has been a “watershed moment” for the company, as Daily put it, with BoxCast now live streaming millions of events per year — everything from sports to religious services to virtual safaris offered by Sri Lanka’s tourism board.
BoxCast dashboard
“When you can’t even meet in-person … we knew that there was going to be higher usage,” he said. “What caught me off-guard was the volume increase — it’s new customers, it’s existing customers, at peak times there’s a 10x increase [from pre-pandemic usage].”
And while in-person events will hopefully become more common next year, Daily said live streams will still be a valuable tool to reach audiences who can’t attend, and to promote your business or organization with new kinds of programming.
COO Sam Brenner added that while BoxCast employed fewer than 40 people before the pandemic, the team has grown to 56, and will likely double within the next 12 months.
The Series A was led by Updata Partners, with participation from audio equipment manufacturer Shure.
“The live streaming video market has grown dramatically over the last decade, and COVID-19 has accelerated adoption in recent months. BoxCast offers a unique end-to-end platform that makes live streaming easy,” said Updata’s Carter Griffin in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Gordon and his team, and look forward to contributing to their vision of making live events accessible to all.”
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Instagram extends time limits on live streams to 4 hours, will soon support archiving
Instagram is adapting to the way creators have been using its service during the coronavirus pandemic. With individuals and businesses now limited from hosting in-person events — like concerts, classes, meetups, and more — users have turned to Instagram to live stream instead. Today, the company says it’s significantly expanding the time limit for these streams, from 1 hour to now 4 hours for all users worldwide.
The change, the company explains, is meant to help those who’ve had to pivot to virtual events, like yoga and fitness instructors, teachers, musicians, artists and activists, among others. During the height of government lockdowns in the U.S., Instagram Live became a place for people to gather as DJ’s hosted live sets, artists played their music for fans, celebs hosted live talk shows, workout enthusiasts joined live classes, and more. Live usage had then jumped 70% over pre-coronavirus numbers in the U.S. as people connected online.
Many of these Instagram Live creators had wanted to extend their sessions beyond the 60 minute time limit without an interruption.
The change puts Instagram on par with the time limits offered by Facebook for live streams from mobile devices, which is also 4 hours. (If live streaming from a desktop computer or via an API, the Facebook time limit expands to 8 hours.)
While the longer time limit is opening up to all creators worldwide starting today, Instagram says the creator’s account has to be “good standing” in order to take advantage. That means the account can’t have a history of either intellectual property or policy violations.
Related to this change, Instagram will also update the “Live Now” section in IGTV and at the end of live streams to help direct users to more live content.
Instagram also today pre-announced another feature which has yet to arrive.
It says that it will “soon” add an option that will allow creators to archive their live streams for up to 30 days.
Image Credits: Instagram
Before, users could archive their Feed posts or their Stories to a private archive, but the only way to save a live stream was to publish it to IGTV immediately after the stream, through a feature introduced in May.
The company says the new option to archive live broadcasts will mirror the existing archive experience for Stories and Feed Posts.
The difference is that archived live videos will be permanently deleted after 30 days.
But up until that time, the creator has the option to return to the video to save it or download it. This would allow the creator to publish the video on other social platforms, like Facebook or YouTube, or even trim out key parts for short-form video platforms, like TikTok. The Archive feature also means if a creator’s Live stream crashes for some reason — or if the creator forgot to download it in the moment — it can still be downloaded later on.
The news follows another recent Instagram update which introduced a new way for creators to monetize their Live streams.
The company earlier this month began rolling out badges in Instagram Live to an initial group of over 50,000 creators who will test the feature by selling badges at price points of $0.99, $1.99, or $4.99. These badges help fans’ comments stand out in busy streams, allow fans to support a favorite creator, and places the fan’s name on the creator’s list of badge holders.
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M17 sells its online dating assets to focus on live streaming
M17 Entertainment announced today that it has sold its online dating assets to focus on its core live-streaming business in Asia and other markets. Paktor Pte, which operates Paktor dating app and other services, was acquired by Kollective Ventures, a venture capital advisory firm. The value of the deal was undisclosed.
In its announcement, Taipei-based M17 said the sale will allow it to focus on expanding its live-streaming business in markets including Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.
Earlier this month, the company said it had raised a $26.5 million Series D that will be used for growth in Japan, where M17 claims a 60% share of the live-streaming market, and expansion into new places like the United States and the Middle East. Its live-streaming apps include 17LIVE (an English-language version is called Livit), Meme Live and live-streaming e-commerce platforms HandsUP and FBBuy.
In a statement, M17 CFO Shang Koo said, “As our Japan live-streaming business has skyrocketed, we found we were unable to devote the same level of internal resources to our dating business in Southeast Asia. Becoming independent will allow Paktor to control its own destiny as M17 focuses heavily on the future of its streaming services in our largest market, Japan.”
Paktor will operate independently of M17 after the sale, but Koo said, “we hope to continue working with Paktor on future business cooperation and will always value the synergy and teamwork between M17 and Paktor.”
M17 was formed in April 2017 when Paktor merged with 17 Media. A year later, M17 was supposed to go public, but cancelled its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on the same day it was supposed to start trading, citing “issues related to the settlement” of shares that CEO Joseph Phua later explained in detail to Tech in Asia.
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Twitch’s loss of top streamers impacts hours watched and streamed in Q4 2019, report says
The loss of several big-name streamers is finally taking its toll on Twitch, according to a new report from StreamLabs and Newzoo out today. In August 2019, top streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, announced his intention to leave Twitch for Microsoft Mixer. Several others have since defected as well, including competitive gamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, who went to Mixer in October, Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, who left in November for YouTube Live, and Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang, who also left in November, but went to Facebook Gaming.
The loss of Ninja hadn’t impacted the amount of time Twitch users spent watching content on the platform as of Q3 2019, but the total hours streamed had slightly dipped. As of Q4 2019, however, Twitch’s momentum began to slow.
While the Amazon-owned streaming site is still by far the leader in terms of hours of content both watched and streamed compared with rivals, with a market share of 75.1%, the number of hours watched on Twitch declined from Q3 to Q4 2019 by 9.8%.
This resulted in the lowest number of hours watched on the platform (2,299.6 million) since Q3 2018 (2,283.9 million).
That being said, Twitch overall is still growing, with a 12% increase in total hours watched on the platform in 2019 compared with 2018.
The high-profile losses are also now impacting the hours streamed on Twitch, the report found.
The platform in Q4 2019 saw the lowest number of hours streamed (82.7 million) since Q2 2018 (86 million). Again, the trend on a year-over-year basis is still climbing upwards, with a 16.1% increase in total hours streamed in 2019 versus 2018.
Twitch saw declines in the number of unique channels streaming over the course of 2019, too, dropping from 5.6 million in Q1 2019 — the highest ever — to 3.7 million by Q4.
Concurrent viewers declined on a quarterly basis by 9.4%. This is the lowest average concurrent viewership figure since Q3 2018. On an annual basis, however, concurrent viewership was still up by 12.3%. The average number of viewers per channel was stable and has increased by 12.5% since Q1 2018.
YouTube Gaming Live, meanwhile, became the only platform to see increases in hours watched, streamed and concurrent viewership in Q4 2019.
CourageJD’s move to YouTube Gaming Live has helped to boost Google’s platform, but the increases can also be attributed to YouTube’s broadcast of top esports events and influencer moments.
The total number of hours watched on YouTube Gaming Live grew 46% from Q1 to Q4 2019 to reach 909.1 million — making that the largest percentage increase among gaming sites. Hours streamed remained stable, closing the year at 12.3 million. Unique channels increased 4.8% on a quarterly basis, but declined 24.6% from Q1 2019.
YouTube Gaming Live’s biggest jump was in concurrent viewers, which grew by a sizable 33.8% in Q4 — making it the only platform to see an increase in average concurrent viewership in the quarter. Average viewers per channel also increased by 21% quarter-over-quarter — even though the number of unique streaming channels grew by 4.8%, which usually means a drop in average viewers per channel would occur.
YouTube Gaming Live closed the year with 22.1% market share.
Ninja’s move to Mixer has encouraged other streamers to start broadcasting on the platform, but despite that deal and the one with Shroud, the number of hours watched declined 8.5% quarter-over-quarter, from 90.2 million in Q3 2019 to 82.5 million in Q4 2019. But year-over-year, Mixer’s hours watched have more than doubled.
Ninja and Shroud have helped boost the number of hours streamed on Mixer, more than doubling the number of hours in Q3. But in Q4, the number of hours streamed dropped 12.9%, from 32.6 million to 28.4 million.
However, 80.3 million hours of content was streamed in 2019 versus just 35.2 million hours in 2018.
There also was a 7.5% decrease in the number of Mixer channels in Q4 (3.9 million to 3.6 million), but a 78% increased in 2019 compared with 2018. Mixer now has triple the number of unique channels streaming, compared with YouTube Gaming Live.
Average concurrent viewership on Mixer declined 8% from Q3 to Q4, but was up 55.1% year-over-year. Average viewers per channel remained stable.
Mixer closed the year with a 2.7% market share.
The report doesn’t include Facebook Gaming live streaming data. But it does note there was a 400% increase in the number of live streams in 2019, from 504,173 live streams in Q1 to 2,525,863 in Q4, based on Facebook Gaming streamers who used the Streamlabs’ OBS product. Additionally, the number of total hours streamed increased by 275%, from 438,835 in Q1 to 1,648,557 in Q4.
Also in Q4, several live streamers made the switch to Facebook, including Disguised Toast, as noted above, as well as Zero and Corinna Kopf. This also could have contributed to the momentum in the quarter, as well as launches of charity live streaming tools, and the arrival of the Facebook Gaming app in Thailand and Latin America.
For the year, the most-watched publisher was Riot Games, due to League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. Epic Games (Fortnite) trailed by only 25.1 million hours. The latter saw a 29% decline, year-over-year, in terms of hours watched, while the former grew just 3.6%.
Similarly, League of Legends was the No. 1 game streamed on Twitch in 2019, followed by Fornite then Grand Theft Auto V. Fornite topped YouTube Gaming Live and Mixer.
While none of the streamers’ defections from Twitch have been significant enough to force the platform from its No. 1 position, it has created a healthier competitive landscape among streaming services. But in reality, it’s still too soon to see what long-term impacts the moves will have on Twitch and whether or not its rivals can continue their momentum in 2020.
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Twitch continues to dominate live streaming with its second-biggest quarter to date
Twitch continues to lead rivals including, YouTube Live, Facebook Gaming and Microsoft’s Mixer, when it comes to live-streaming video. Despite experiencing its first decline in hours watched in Q2 2019, the Amazon-owned game-streaming site still had its second-biggest quarter to date, with more than 70% of the hours watched during the quarter.
According to a new report from StreamElements, Twitch viewers live-streamed a total of 2.72+ billion hours in Q2 — or 72.2% of all live hours watched — compared with 735.54 million hours on YouTube Live (19.5%), 197.76 million on Facebook Gaming (5.3%) and just 112.29 million hours (3%) on Mixer.
Combined, the total hours watched across all four platforms was 3.77 billion in Q2.
While none of Twitch’s rivals are nearly catching up, YouTube Live did have a good month in May, breaking its own record with 284 million hours watched. Overall, YouTube Live’s hours watched improved in Q2 as a result, while Twitch saw a slight decline.
Facebook Gaming is also gaining steam. It’s now the third-biggest live-streaming platform, having passed Microsoft Mixer.
Despite its traction, Twitch doesn’t have much of a long tail when it comes to stream viewership. That’s a problem it has faced for some time, as newcomers complained they spent years broadcasting to no one in hopes of gaining a fan base, with little success. Twitch has tried to remedy this problem with various educational efforts as well as product features like Raids and Squad Streams, for example.
However, the new report finds that the majority (almost 75%) of Twitch’s viewership still comes from people tuning in to the top 5,000 channels. Out of the 2.7 billion hours watched in Q2, these top 5,000 channels drove 2 billion of those hours watched.
In addition, the average concurrent viewership (viewers watching at the same time) of the top 5,000 channels increased by 12% in Q2 2019, compared with Q1. The top 200 channels have the highest concurrent viewership with 10,590 people watching together, on average.
Also in the quarter, viewership of top titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive declined, while vlogging — aka “Just Chatting” — grew, along with other titles.
Esports, meanwhile, still draws big numbers, but represents only a small slice of the overall pie.
The full report, which takes a look at other trends, including which streamers are gaining and losing popularity, is available here.
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Live streaming studio, Culture Genesis, launches its first show, the quiz-based Trivia Mob
A new generation of entrepreneurs is emerging to refashion the Los Angeles studio system for the digital age, forming companies that combine live-streamed video, podcasts and the newfound social media celebrities to craft entertainment for a new breed of consumer.
Two of those startup founders, longtime Apple executive Cedric Rogers and former developer for VEVO and MLB digital Shaun Newsum, are now pulling the curtains back on the first fruit of their production studio, Culture Genesis, with the launch of TriviaMob — a new quiz show targeting urban audiences.
The two creators envision their company as a combination of 106 & Park and Jeopardy with questions aimed at cultural references for the Highsnobiety and Complex set.
TriviaMob players can win up to $10,000 in cash by competing individually or as part of a group (or “mob”) to win collective prizes by tuning in and competing to shows that stream every Sunday. Each player has 10 seconds to answer 10 questions around art, music, science and history. Players that answer all of the questions correctly will get a share of the $10,000 prize and participants who opt to be part of the “mob” can earn points for sponsored prizes.
For its foray into live-streamed appointment entertainment, Culture Genesis has tapped Melvin Gregg, the influencer and star of Netflix’s American Vandal series along with a host of… well… hosts, including former Miss USA contestant, Brittany Lucio; DJ Damage, the co-host of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ flagship show, REVOLT Live; Jessica Flores; and TV host and comedic actress Dariany Santana.
Backed initially by Los Angeles-based accelerator MuckerLab and Betaworks’ latest LiveCamp program, the two founders see Culture Genesis as tapping into the twin trends of gaming and mobile technology adoption in young African American and Latinx communities. The founders cite statistics indicating that 73 percent of African Americans and 72 percent of Latinx consumers over 13 years old identify as gamers.
“We’re building software for an urban, multicultural audience that continues to lead and influence culture — not just in the U.S. but around the world,” said Rogers, in a statement. “We see this influence growing in Hollywood but it’s not happening fast enough in Silicon valley. We want to accelerate this shift.”
The business model mimics that of HQ Trivia, the once-popular quiz show whose success has waned even as it scored massive gains in venture fundraising — valuing the company at a reported $100 million.
But the founders of Culture Genesis see their first product as fundamentally different from HQ. “People want to see things for them by them,” says Rogers. “From our perspective HQ meant nothing to our audience.”
Newsum, the company’s chief technology officer, goes even further. “I think HQ was a prime example of our thesis. HQ from a multicultural perspective — that didn’t appeal to our audience. Part of what we’re doing with Cultural Genesis is bringing that urban understanding.”
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YouTube is closing the gap with Twitch on live streaming, report finds
Twitch continues to dominate the live streaming market, with approximately 2.5 billion hours watched by viewers in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new industry report out this morning. While YouTube still trails, it’s begun to close the gap with Twitch, it appears. YouTube’s live streaming platform, YouTube Live, started the year with 15 percent of the overall live streaming market’s viewership, but by September 2018, it had grown to roughly 25 percent of all live streaming hours viewed.
These findings, and more, were the subject of a “state of the industry” report released today by StreamElements, which also dug into what’s making these live streaming sites tick.
Of course, Twitch is still the market leader, with around 750 million monthly viewers, on average, who watched over 813 million hours in September. YouTube Live, by comparison, saw over 226 million hours that month, and Microsoft’s Mixer saw just 13+ million.
Also of note is that Twitch’s growth is now coming from the long tail, the report claims. Its top 100 channels haven’t grown much since the beginning of the year – in fact, they’re down a bit, according to the findings. In January 2018, viewers watch around 262 million hours on the top 100, which dropped to 254 million in September.
In addition, Twitch is growing viewership thanks to its expanded focus outside of gaming content. IRL streaming – meaning, watching creators “in real life” going about their day, vlogging, or participating in other activities, for example – is now one of the site’s most consistently growing categories, with 41 million more hours watched in Q3 2018 than in Q1.
This growth likely impacted Twitch’s recent decision to do away with the overarching “IRL” category to instead break down the content into subcategories like music, food & drink, ASMR, beauty, and more, and other organizational changes to its site.
StreamElements also claims that game streams and other content – but not the competitions known as “esports” – are what’s attracting viewers.
Esports viewership now makes up 9 to 17 percent of overall Twitch viewership, the report says. (This is consistent with findings Newzoo has reported in past years, as well.)
The report’s data, however, is not first-party – it comes from StreamElements’ position as a production and community management solutions provider for live streamers, which allows it some insight into live streaming trends. The company also partnered with streaming analysts StreamHatchet to compile this report, it says.
That being said, it’s not the only one to point to YouTube’s more recent growth. In StreamLabs’ Q2 report this year, it also found that YouTube’s live gaming streams were on the rise, as was viewership. But StreamLabs tends to look at concurrent streams and viewership, so it’s not a direct comparison.
YouTube recently did away with its standalone YouTube Gaming app, and incorporated gaming content more directly into its main site. This could impact its future growth even more than is reflected in this Q3-focused report.
Finally, the report also found that Fortnite’s popularity may have peaked – it’s still the most watched game on Twitch, but since reaching over 151 million hours watched in July, it’s been shedding viewers. The game saw 20 million fewer hours viewed in August, then dropped by another 25 million hours in September.
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YouTube to shut down standalone Gaming app, as gaming gets a new home on YouTube
YouTube will no longer maintain a separate app targeting gaming and live game streaming, the company announced today. The YouTube Gaming app, which first arrived in 2015, will be sunset sometime next spring as its host of features make their way over to YouTube’s main site.
Over the years, the YouTube Gaming app has been a place where YouTube experimented with features catering to game creators and viewers who like to watch live and recorded esports. Here, it tested things like Game Pages to make games more discoverable, Super Chat, and Channel Memberships – features which the Amazon-owned game streaming site Twitch had also popularized among the game community.
Some of YouTube Gaming’s features became so well-received that the company brought them to YouTube. For example, this June YouTube introduced channel memberships to its main site. And before that, it had brought Super Chat – a way for creators to make money from live streams – to its broader community, as well.
But while gaming remains one of YouTube’s top verticals, no one was really using the standalone YouTube Gaming app, the company says.
“We have 200 million people that are logged in, watching gaming content every single day,” Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s Director of Gaming Content and Partnerships, tells TechCrunch. “And the majority of them, quite frankly, are just not using the YouTube Gaming app for their gaming experiences,” he says.
However, data from Sensor Tower shows the app had over 11 million installs across iOS and Android, and those installs have remained consistent over time. That indicates a large number of people were at least willing to try the app. But the firm also found that its daily users were a “tiny fraction” of Twitch’s on iOS, which confirms Wyatt’s point about lack of usage.
Instead, gamers are logging into YouTube to watch gaming, Wyatt explains.
They watch a lot of gaming, too – over the last twelve months, fans streamed more than 50 billion hours of gaming content, and YouTube has over 500,000 quarterly active live gaming streamers.
In other words, YouTube’s decision to sunset the standalone app should not be seen as an admission that it’s ceding this space to Twitch – rather, that it’s now deciding to use the power of YouTube’s flagship app to better compete.
On that front, the company is today launching a new YouTube Gaming destination at youtube.com/gaming. The destination is first available in the U.S., and will roll out globally in the months ahead.
A link to the new vertical will appear in the left-side navigation bar, where you find other top-level sections like Trending and Subscriptions.
The Gaming destination will feature personalized content at the top of the page, based on what you like to watch, along with top live games, the latest gaming videos from your subscriptions, and dedicated shelves for live streams and trending videos.
Another feature, “gaming creator on the rise,” will highlight up-and-coming gaming creators who are still trying to build an audience. That’s something that many say is still an issue on Amazon-owned Twitch – often, their early days are spent streaming to no one. They soon find that they need the blessing of an existing influencer to bring more viewers to their channel.
Wyatt points out, too, that YouTube Gaming won’t be all about live streams.
“The other thing that we learned through this process was that the gaming app, and the narrative around it, was very heavily live-focused. Everybody always talked about all the live streaming and live gaming,” he says. “But what that did was underserve the vast gaming
business. So by moving it over to YouTube main, you have this beautiful combination of both the living gaming streams that are continuing to grow massively on YouTube, as well as all the other VOD content on the platform.”
There are several things that YouTube’s new Gaming destination still lacks, however. Most notably, the ability to live stream gameplay right from your phone.
That’s why the YouTube Gaming app won’t immediately disappear. Instead, it will stick around until March or maybe even April 2019, while YouTube works on porting the experience over to its main site and app.
“We’re still working through that,” Wyatt admits, when asked how the live streaming component will come to YouTube proper. “We haven’t made a decision on if [live game streaming] will be in there by March, but we do need to have a solution for easy mobile capture from the phone,” he says.
The YouTube Gaming app was never a global release, as it was only live in select markets, we should note. YouTube’s Gaming vertical will eventually be launched worldwide. That could make it more of a challenge to Twitch, as it taps into the eyeballs of YouTube’s 1.8 billion users, while also expanding to take advantage of other new YouTube features like Premieres or Merchandise.
“It’s a great opportunity to use those features,” Wyatt notes, regarding the shift from YouTube Gaming to YouTube proper. “And we’re going to keep creating more features that will that will really lend themselves to live, but ultimately we’ll be thinking about really unique ways to apply them to VOD as well,” he says.
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Twitch launches a ‘how-to’ site for streamers, Twitch Creator Camp
Twitch wants more people to stream, so it’s going to begin teaching them how. The video game streaming site today announced the launch of Twitch Creator Camp, a new educational resource that helps newcomers learn the basics of streaming, as well as how to build up a channel, connect with fans, and earn rewards.
The launch of the how-to site comes about a week after an article by The Verge detailed the long tail of Twitch streamers, with a focus on those who spend years broadcasting to no one in the hopes of one day gaining a following.
The article raised the question that, in the age of live streaming, where every major social company – including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – today offers easy streaming tools, there many not be enough of an audience for all the content creators are producing.
Twitch, apparently, believes the issue is one that can be addressed – at least in part – by training new streamers.
On Twitch Creator Camp, the company is bringing in successful creators to help educate the would-be streamers on a variety of often-discussed topics. These insights will be shared as articles, videos and live streams.
At launch, the site includes content focused on a variety of streaming best practices, including the basics of setting up a channel, building a brand, leveraging their stats, using Twitch features like emotes, badges and extensions, and more.
Streamers will also learn how to better network with others and engage their audience, as well as how to optimize their channel for monetization through subscriptions, merchandise, ads and sponsorships.
In addition, creators will begin live streaming on Creator Camp, starting on July 31 at 2 PM PT.
At this time, a number of Twitch Partners will answer general questions about streaming. A calendar of upcoming streams is also available on Twitch’s site, as the company aims to host weekly sessions going forward.
“Hosting a good stream isn’t easy. We’ve heard from many of our creators that they spend a lot of time searching for advice on effective tools, features, and techniques in order to make their broadcasts more engaging and to grow their communities,” said Jessica Messinger, Creator Growth Marketing Manager at Twitch, in a statement.
“Twitch Creator Camp makes things simpler by centralizing the most relevant information to a creator’s success, all of which is provided by Twitch and many of our successful Partners. We want to help our creators succeed and this is just the beginning,” she added.
Twitch says the partners it’s working with for Creator Camp are being compensated for their efforts. Currently, those participating include: Jericho, gassymexican, teawrex, JGhosty, pokket, firedragon, venalis, tominationtime, sypherpk, xmiramira, iamBrandon, DeejayKnight, Lobosjr, sacriel, PmsProxy, itmeJP, kaypealol, and Pokimane.
Twitch today has over 2.2 million broadcasters serving up streams on its site every month, which are consumed by 15 million daily active viewers who watch an average of 95 minutes of content daily. However, much of the on-site activity – just like on YouTube and elsewhere – is dominated by top creators.
Meanwhile, many of Twitch’s smaller streamers may already understand the basics and tips that Twitch’s Creator Camp is offering. For them, the issue is not one of following all the steps being laid out, but rather one of discovery.
Twitch has been working to address its discovery issues, too, having last month detailed a number of projects it’s working on across this front which are in various phases of development.
“We don’t believe Twitch should be a popularity contest” the company said at the time.
Twitch Creator Camp is open as of today, with the live streams starting at the end of the month.
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