Maybe a few more ads in the middle of the thing I’m trying to watch, with no way to pause or rewind to catch what I missed, will do the trick.
When did that start? I used to be on Twitch 4-5 years ago, but never went back since then.
I don’t remember ads at all back then
Ads used to be run at the streamers’ discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn’t work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I’m watching on YouTube so I don’t miss anything.
I mostly watch YouTube streamers. Once in a while they’ll do a Twitch stream and holy shit it’s night and day. 0 ads on YouTube and 30 second and even sometimes 1 minute unskippable ads constantly interrupting the stream on Twitch. I honestly have no idea how people put up with it. I cancelled cable because I didn’t want to watch ads, I’m not going to a site that does the same.
My adblock blocks the ads, but I still get that stupid purple screen. What really annoys me is that it’s a minute and a half long. Twitch really wants me to disable ad block so I look at an ad on a Livestream for almost two fucking minutes.
I minimize and do something else until then but that’s asinine.
hold on, you mean to tell me a platform that exists and is known purely for LIVE streaming content has put ads OVER the livestream interrupting your view? what kind of idiot would have approved such a service killing move?
As a mod, you can postpone an ad by 5 minutes 3 times. You can’t postpone it by 1 minute, you can’t choose to play them during downtime, you can’t do shit but pray an interesting moment doesn’t happen during the 1 minute.
Adblockers still work so I’ve never seen ads on twitch
You know what that means: Gifting a sub with Prime is about to go away and so are all the loot drops with Prime. Also, more no opt out ads, longer preroll ads, and a larger list of partnered games getting headway.
So you know typical enshittification stuff.
This always makes me wonder how their operation can be so pricey.
It sounds more like their human resource cost is just absurd, not that their underlying technical operation is the problem. Plus assuming they did any calculation on the ads at all, their server usage should pay for itself as more load means more views means more ad impressions.
But what does Twitch need X-thousand people for if they still cannot do anything about curating content with those endless people? All I see of them is someone writing flip-flopping statements about whether nudity on stream is okay or not, always depends on which month it is it feels like.
Video encoding is an expensive operation and probably the second largest cost next to wages. And apparently they aren’t even on an AWS SLA.
AN AMAZON SUBSIDIARY NOT ON AN SLA
Are they really a revenue sink to cover up taxable income?
Shouldn’t the encoding happen locally, on the user’s computer, before it’s even sent to Twitch?
The user doesn’t send several different resolutions of video, the streamer just sends the source, and once thay have enough viewers, twitch reduces the resolution on their side so the viewer can choose either quality.
Or they just shutter twitch once they realize it’s unprofitable.
Don’t get my hopes up
If you are bad at your job, you lose your job. If the CEO is bad at their job, you lose your job. If the CEO is REALLY bad at their job, they get a golden parachute.
I simply don’t believe this. They probably don’t count all the gamers, who get Amazon prime for all the twitch loot. Then you also have people who throw around subs like confetti. Thot streams.
I simply don’t believe this.
Best financial analysis I’ve ever heard. But maybe look up video hosting and streaming costs before speculating so confidently?
very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.
live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That’s why twitch still don’t have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.
They’re also probably relying on AWS right? I’m assuming the pipeline for serving up prime video would be similar but it’s hard to tell how much that service “makes”. I feel like anything they’re using their own GPUs for is losing quite a bit of money compared to charging their cloud compute customers for it.
If twitch shuts down in a few months I won’t be surprised.
Since they are bought by Amazon I think any service they wasn’t on AWS would have been moved to AWS. Basically, on demand video streaming service (netflix, youtube, etc) does have finer control of how they want to re-encode and have like bit rate throttle on the server/client side so you don’t see too much buffering if internet connection is acting up. This means they can throttle you down to 360p like youtube auto if their data center isn’t fast enough to fetch the high bit rate yet and then feed you the higher quality one once they got it. (or down grade if your connection goes bad) But twitch stream is like I have a 10Mbits stream incoming and I have to copy, run a 2nd pass on the fly for different resolution, duplicate to outgoing servers and send to user all under 4~6s delay. I am not expert on the backend side and only have some experience dealing with streaming around 2016~2018. So to me that’s incredible feat but the short timespan means they can’t crunch the output bit rate even if it’s pretty static video. Compare to youtube, if I uploaded a 20~30 minutes video in about 12GB on disk, it took them about 3~5 hours to re-encode, even if the source is already encoded with AV1. (I am not partner so I join the queue like any normal pleb on the internet.)
edit forgot to respond to the cloud GPU thing, I think AWS will be charging Twitch the same way as other company, so AWS aren’t really “losing” money if Twitch choose to use cloud instance with GPU(which would be kinda dumb). They need higher throughput for the data in/out so whatever the CPU ingest part I mentioned above is just to breakdown the stream and feed to user as quick as possible. They are not going to waste anytime to give you better quality stream with lower bandwidth cost. they just feed you whatever fits into their bandwidth budget basically.
Subs of which they can often take 50% commission on.
It is believable when you remember that American companies simply don’t need to be profitable anymore
Maybe he should take a big pay cut if he’s doing that bad a job
Is our business plan out of touch?
No, it’s the employees who are wrong.
Get a better CEO then.
Idk that homeless guy looks like he’s got it figured out!
Oh please they couldn’t fucking handle moderation I don’t trust them to handle fucking money either.
Let it rot
What’s your alternative? YouTube?
Kinda? Though they need a better discovery page for live streams.
Maybe we don’t actually need 10 hours of video game playing and bikini wearing at a time. Maybe that’s not a good product.
Clearly people want it. Who are you to say what’s a good product?
The average^^@ user watches Twitch from 4pm to 5.30pm twice a week. There is absolutely a delta between what is required to be a profitable service, what is quality entertainment and what the service is and does currently.
^^@ this isn’t literal, but illustrative
No idea how you can come to any of these conclusions given that viewer numbers are publicly visible. If this were true the streamers wouldn’t be live as much as they are outside these hours.
Justin.tv 2.
I’ll be honest, if the solution is Twitch, then I don’t need my problem solved. That is, compared to Twitch, I don’t need an alternative. Not having Twitch is a solid improvement over having Twitch. (kidding of course, but all too often it feels like that with just how bad the technical aspects of their site are)
One has to wonder if they just split off adult content into a separate platform using the same Amazon logins, and including cross-platform notifications one way from the twitch site to the adult site whether it would solve both their cash flow and advertising problem.
Or just buy Onlyfans. 😅 For Onlyfans it’d solve their payment issues: Amazon allows using it for payment, and Amazon is big enough that Visa and MC cannot just threaten it.
Amazon is so damn big that they could sell the service for OnlyTwitch via Amazon. Amazon sells loads of sex toys and adult products so they just sell a virtual balance card that you redeem on OnlyTwitch. OnlyTwitch itself could be effectively a business that doesn’t have to manage payments at all and just uses balance.
I want to do the math here, but I’m already late to the party. Amazon sells sex toys as health and beauty products. It’s a thin vaneer of plausible deniability. I’d be curious if Amazon is actually large enough financially to actually leverage the large processors. I would be honestly surprised if Amazon is handling a large enough stake by themselves to offset literally every other vendor on the planet combined. But they might. I don’t actually know.
That’s kinda what I mean that they could hide it in giftcard sales so the payment processors wouldn’t really be the wiser just like how they hide adult products.
Where’s that article that shows firms that make workers redundant are worse off in the long run when one needs it? Fuck these cunts. Maybe we should just get rid of capitalism instead.
I’ve never understood the appeal of watching twitch streams, I enjoy the edited compiled stuff with all the boring moments cut out that ends up on YouTube sometimes, but I see no point in watching a dude eating and drinking and staring at his monitor and shouting out to viewers.
Actively, no, but passively on a second monitor, I occasionally join in the discussion in chat. Finding a smallish streamer who actually reads you messages is nice.
Maybe then watch better streams. I usually watch streamers play games while talking to the chat or commenting on the gameplay, while I play a similar game. It’s entertaining.
There’s a lot more than just dudes eating and shouting.
Is it the infrastructure costs? I imagine that costs quite a bit
They pay themselves for infrastructure costs effectively, so it would be the wholesale price. Would love to see their actual accounting book, public data says they made 2.8 billion, would love to see where it went.
I’ve heard (yes anecdotal) that on the books, Twitch pays AWS full retail for server time.
Makes me wonder if that’s done on purpose? Amazon just wants to kill Twitch and rent out IVS (their internal system) to other streaming platforms (like they do for Kick). THAT is outside money coming in.
Why should AWS subsidize Twitch?
From the point of view of AWS, they make money whether they host Twitch or some other streamer. If Twitch can’t make money paying retail hosting, the decision of what to do with it has to be made by people who control Twitch.
Why should AWS subsidize Twitch?
Because they kinda do it for every service of them, the point is to spread to all the markets with subsidies until kill the competition, and then keep a marginal profit to avoid competition while still makes a marginal profit (what in scale is a big profit anyway). This is usually what these megacorps do.
Do they? I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS even charges Amazon.com full retail for hosting. The point is the company has a lot of different business units that report up to the CEO, and business units generally act like mini companies.
The accounting of charging full retail to other business units is a lot cleaner than giving preferred rates and making it harder to understand the finances of what is going on with the different business units.
A CEO may be willing to operate a business unit at a loss for strategic reasons, but they have to understand that said business unit is costing the company money.
Tech companies have rate cards for valued customers or internal use. Netflix don’t pay retail price for AWS, nor do Amazon subsidiaries.
Source: Work there, and have worked at companies with yearly defined rate cards. If Twitch are paying retail price, they’re being mugged.
Imho you’re wrong there.
Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.
Both to audience and shareholders. It’ll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.
This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.
They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.
Well, until they can beat YouTube live and their game streaming there they have to compete still
They recently left South Korea too.
Data is surprisingly cheap. It’s more than likely just reinvesting any profits into growth to boost stock price/investment. A lot of companies are hitting the point where growth is leveling off, so they’ve switched to cutting costs
Bandwidth, which you need for streaming is not cheap
They thought the party was going to last forever, so they ordered a bunch of jumbo pizzas and kegs
I mean it’s more like they paid themselves a bunch of bonuses and hired super duper growth hacking experts or whatever, and now they can’t pay for them, so god forbid they cut from the top
Fucking doubt it. This is just an excuse for the layoffs. All the big streamers have tons and tons of subs, a lot of users have Twitch Prime since it’s so cheap and they show multiple unskippable ads all the time. Plus, they are owned by Amazon and use their server infrastructure. This is 100% bullshit.
Sounds like Hollywood accounting where the movies with the largest gaps between production costs and ticket sales magically lose money.
Former Amazon employee here - Twitch is IMO a perfect example of Amazon tactics. Acquire, ignore, drain the engineering team down to a skeleton crew, further en- 💩 -ify the platform, and then wonder why profits are dwindling.
What a weird rollercoaster.
Three months ago at TwitchCon he was all smiles.
Wow who knew that capitulating to neo-nazis wasn’t profitable.
What are you even talking about
Crackergate.
I know that was a really stupid controversy, but definitely doesn’t mean it’s a neo nazi sure lol
No but it’s one in a long history of siding with the most fickle and destructive of the userbase. Nobody was asking them to make a big deal out of cracker, not even actual neo nazis give a shit about cracker beyond its use as a tool to bad-faith shut down people they don’t like.
This was a time when actual slurs were being thrown around completely unmoderated, famously saying that ret–d was allowed, which is an apt descriptor for what taking that stance and then proceeding to ban a bunch of their biggest left streamers for a discussing a mild slur was. It didn’t appease the people it was supposed to appease, all it did was drive away even more of the less politically repugnant users.
I was there for the drama too. It was hilarious the people crying racism for saying cracker, and the immediately follow up with the r word the same day. Mostly the Destiny guys who intentionally are bad faith basement dwellers. It was fucked up because they gave zero context about the word and grouped it up with racial slurs like the n word, which is completely racist to do that. So I definitely agree with you there. I mean we both know why, it’s because the website is 90% white males.
Nope. It’s because Twitch allowed nudity. This was the final straw for most
Would have blown right over if they didn’t foster an audience of neofascists.
Nope. You’re comparing two different issues.
If you’re incapable of seeing the bigger picture then there’s nothing I can or should say.
Bruh. Tf does a fascist audience have to do with Twitch falling off? What I was saying was that the debacle surrounding nudity was the last straw for most.
