Twitch is an American video live-streaming service popular in video games, including broadcasts of esports competitions. It also offers music broadcasts, creative content, and "in real life" streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon. It was introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv.
Content on the site can be viewed either live or via video on demand. The games shown on Twitch's homepage are listed according to audience preference and include genres such as real-time strategy games, fighting games, racing games, and first-person shooters.
The popularity of Twitch eclipsed that of Justin.tv. In October 2013, the website had 45 million unique viewers, and by February 2014, it was considered the fourth-largest source of peak Internet traffic in the United States. At the same time, Justin.tv's parent company was re-branded as Twitch Interactive to represent the shift in focus when Justin.tv was getting shut down in August 2014. The same month, the service was acquired by Amazon for 970 million, which later led to the introduction of synergies with the company's subscription service Amazon Prime.
By 2015, Twitch had more than 100 million viewers per month. In 2017, Twitch remained the leading live-streaming video service for video games in the US, and had an advantage over YouTube Gaming, which shut down its standalone app in May 2019. it had three million broadcasters monthly and 15 million active users daily, with 1.4 million average concurrent users. Twitch had over 27,000 partner channels. Twitch was the 30th-most-visited website in the world with 23.46% of its traffic coming from the United States, followed by Russia with 8.87%, Germany with 7.08% and France with 6.26%. In late 2023, Twitch announced that it would stop operating in South Korea in 2024 because of its network fee policy, citing prohibitive costs.
History Founding and initial growth (2007–2013) When Justin.tv was launched in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, two recent Yale graduates, the site was divided into several content categories. The gaming category grew especially fast, and became the most popular content on the site. In June 2011, the company decided to spin off the gaming content as TwitchTV, inspired by the term twitch gameplay. It launched officially in public beta on June 6, 2011. Since then, Twitch has attracted more than 35 million unique visitors a month. Twitch had about 80 employees in June 2013, which increased to 100 by December 2013. The company was headquartered in San Francisco's Financial District.
Twitch has been supported by significant investments of venture capital, with in 2012 (on top of originally raised for Justin.tv), and in 2013. Investors during three rounds of fund raising leading up to the end of 2013 included Draper Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners and Thrive Capital. In addition to the influx of venture funding, it was believed in 2013 that the company had become profitable.
Especially since the shutdown of its direct competitor Own3d.tv in early 2013, Twitch has become the most popular e-sports streaming service by a large margin, leading some to conclude that the website has a "near monopoly on the market". Competing video services, such as YouTube and Dailymotion, began to increase the prominence of their gaming content to compete, but have had a much smaller impact so far. As of mid-2013, there were over 43 million viewers on Twitch monthly, with the average viewer watching an hour and a half a day. By February 2014, Twitch was the fourth largest source of Internet traffic during peak times in the United States, behind Netflix, Google, and Apple. Twitch made up 1.8% of total US Internet traffic during peak periods.
In late 2013, particularly due to increasing viewership, Twitch had issues with lag and low frame rates in Europe. Twitch has subsequently added new servers in the region. Also in order to address these problems, Twitch implemented a new video system shown to be more efficient than the previous system. Initially, the new video system was criticized by users because it caused a significant stream delay, interfering with broadcaster–viewer interaction. Twitch staff said that the increased delay was likely temporary and at the time, was an acceptable trade-off for the decrease in buffering.
Growth, YouTube acquisition speculation (2014)
On February 10, 2014, Twitch's parent company (Justin.tv, Inc.) was renamed Twitch Interactive, reflecting the increased prominence of the service over Justin.tv as the company's main business. That same month, a stream known as Twitch Plays Pokémon, a crowdsourced attempt to play Pokémon Red using a system translating chat commands into game controls, went viral. By February 17, the channel reached over 6.5 million total views and averaged concurrent viewership between 60 and 70,000 viewers with at least 10% participating. Vice President of Marketing Matthew DiPietro praised the stream as "one more example of how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends WAY beyond the original intent of the game creator. By merging a video game, live video and a participatory experience, the broadcaster has created an entertainment hybrid custom made for the Twitch community. This is a wonderful proof of concept that we hope to see more of in the future." Beginning with its 2014 edition, Twitch was made the official live-streaming platform of the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
On May 18, 2014, Variety first reported that Google had reached a preliminary deal to acquire Twitch through its YouTube subsidiary for approximately .
On August 5, 2014, the original Justin.tv site suddenly ceased operations, citing a need to focus resources entirely on Twitch. On August 6, 2014, Twitch introduced an updated archive system, with multi-platform access to highlights from past broadcasts by a channel, higher quality video, increased server backups, and a new Video Manager interface for managing past broadcasts and compiling "highlights" from broadcasts that can also be exported to YouTube. Due to technological limitations and resource requirements, the new system contained several regressions; the option to archive complete broadcasts on an indefinite basis ("save forever") was removed, meaning that they can only be retained for a maximum of 14 days, or 60 for partners and Turbo subscribers. While compiled highlights can be archived indefinitely, they were limited to two hours in length. In addition, Twitch introduced a copyright fingerprinting system that would mute audio in archived clips if it detected a copyrighted song in the stream.
Amazon subsidiary (2014–present)
On August 25, 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive for in an all-cash deal. Sources reported that the rumoured Google deal had fallen through and allowed Amazon to make the bid, with Forbes reporting that Google had backed out of the deal due to potential antitrust concerns surrounding it and its existing ownership of YouTube. The acquisition closed on September 25, 2014. Take-Two Interactive, which owned a 2% stake at the time of the acquisition, made a windfall of $22 million.
Under Amazon, Shear continued as chief executive officer of Twitch Interactive, with Sara Clemens added to the executive team as chief operating officer in January 2018. Shear touted the Amazon Web Services platform as an "attractive" aspect of the deal, and that Amazon had "built relationships with the big players in media", which could be used to the service's advantage—particularly in the realm of content licensing. The purchase of Twitch marked the third recent video gaming–oriented acquisition by Amazon, which had previously acquired the developers Reflexive Entertainment and Double Helix Games.
On December 9, 2014, Twitch announced it had acquired GoodGame Agency, an organisation that owns the esports teams Evil Geniuses and Alliance. In March 2015, Twitch reset all user passwords and disabled all connections to external Twitter and YouTube accounts after the service reported that someone had gained "unauthorised access" to the user information of some Twitch users.
In June 2016, Twitch added a new feature known as "Cheering", a special form of emoticon purchased as a microtransaction using an in-site currency known as "Bits". Bits are bought using Amazon Payments, and cheers act as donations to the channel. Users also earn badges within a channel based on how much they have cheered.
On August 1, 2016, it was reported that Twitch had signed a lease for 185,000 square feet (17,187 m2) in a new office tower to be constructed at 350 Bush Street in San Francisco.
On August 16, 2016, Twitch acquired Curse LLC, an operator of online video gaming communities and gaming-oriented VoIP software. In December 2016, GoodGame Agency was divested by Amazon to their respective members due to conflict of interest concerns. On September 30, 2016, Twitch announced Twitch Prime, a service which provides premium features that are exclusive to users who have an active Amazon Prime subscription. This included advertising-free streaming, monthly offers of free add-on content ("Game Loot"), and game discounts. Games included with the game loot rewards were Apex Legends, Legends of Runeterra, FIFA Ultimate Team, Teamfight Tactics, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Doom Eternal, and more.
In December 2016, Twitch announced a semi-automated chat moderation tool (), which uses natural language processing and machine learning to set aside potentially unwanted content for human review. In February 2017, Twitch announced the Twitch Game Store, a digital distribution platform that would expose digital purchases of games within the site's browsing interface. When streaming games available on the store, partnered channels could display a referral link to purchase the game—receiving a 5% commission. Users also received a "Twitch Crate" on every purchase, which included Bits and a collection of random chat emotes.
In August 2017, Twitch announced it had acquired video indexing platform ClipMine. In March 2018, Twitch Prime was expanded with free monthly game bundles, including games from its Indie Amplifier program. Indie Amplifier had users vote for a game to be given away by Prime.
On August 20, 2018, Twitch announced that it will no longer offer advertising-free access to the entire service to Amazon Prime subscribers, with this privilege requiring the separate "Twitch Turbo" subscription or an individual channel subscription. This privilege ended for new customers effective September 14, 2018, and for existing customers October 2018. In October 2018, Twitch announced Amazon Blacksmith, a new extension allowing broadcasters to configure displays of products associated with their streams with Amazon affiliate links. On November 27, 2018, Twitch discontinued the Game Store service, citing that it did not generate as much additional revenue for partners as it had hoped, and new revenue opportunities such as Amazon Blacksmith. Users retain access to their purchased games. On December 12, 2018, Fandom, Inc. had reached an agreement to acquire Curse Media, a spin-off of Curse, from Twitch Interactive for an undisclosed amount. Curse was dissolved and its assets were moved under Twitch Interactive.
Twitch's new headquarters at 350 Bush Street opened in August 2019. To comply with historic preservation requirements, the developer kept the front facade of the San Francisco Curb Exchange, but tore down everything behind the facade, and built a reconstruction of the old trading hall through which visitors must walk to reach the modern high-rise office tower behind it.