Do You Like the Direction Twitch is Going?

I went to Twitch today to watch some streams. I've found that a lot of streams have such a heavy emphasis on benefits for those donated. Now I'm going to bring up a touchy subject here: women that are streaming on Twitch. I found one girl who was streaming WoW and the camera focused on her took up the majority of the screen, with the actual gameplay in the corner as a tiny square. Also on the screen was some rolling text for top donator of the week, etc. etc. Listed below that was top donator of all time which was nearly $2,000. Who would donate $2,000 to someone who isn't actually playing a game on a website about streaming games?

There are legitimate streamers (regardless of gender) and they'll continue to do great things. I know Twitch doesn't have the best community, but will there actually be efforts to prevent it from becoming a cash grab if the issue becomes more prominent? Cosmo, for example, deserves all the money he gets. He streams often and devotes a lot of time to it. In comparison these other people that I mentioned make it seem so dirty.

It seems like you've actually got 3-4 separate points here.

What benefits are there for those that donated? The only ones I can think of are "you can play in donator-only/subscriber-only games with me" or sub-only chat. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me.

I'm not sure if you're including lists of top donators on stream, but I also have zero issues with it. It's nice for people to actually see their name on something/see the streamer read their donation message (think Cosmo's stream, for example) and there will always be people that are willing to donate a bunch just to have their name up there. It happens with every humble bundle and it happens with twitch streams. I don't see anything wrong with that, either.

There will always be women (or men, I guess) that will try to use sex appeal (or whatever) to be exploitative, and twitch happens to have a format in which that can occur. You say that she's playing but only in the corner of the screen, but then you ask who would donate to her if she's not even playing a game, so which is it? If she's playing, then whatever, that's fine. It's dumb and exploitative, but it's fine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but GB, IGN, GI, etc. all stream through twitch, right? They all have streams that aren't always fullscreen game with tiny webcam window 100% of the time. I think if you start trying to tell people how they can and can't connect with you're audience, you're falling down a slippery slope, and it's even worse if you start telling the big streamers/sites that they can be exceptions to the rule. If people think the way a streamer streams is dumb, then they'll stop watching it, and that should be enough of a filter (beyond things explicitly banned by twitch, like nudity/non-games, etc.).

All I want from Twitch is a website interface that isn't a mess and doesn't look like it was designed exclusively for tablets.

@marokai: Certainly wasn't designed for Android tablets. Ain't got no damned search function.

Twitch to me is purely a platform that allows people to deliver content easily over the internet to a large audience.I don't actually go to Twitch to find shows - people or organizations I'm interested in use Twitch to provide content and that's when I go. The one thing Twitch could do to really make me hate them is start blasting me with "Check out these sponsored streams!" like how YouTube just HAS to inform me about channels that pay for greater visibility.

And then if people WANT to pay money to these Twitch girls then so be it - clearly if they're giving them money they are filling some kind of weird niche in the market. It's dumb, it's a waste of money for anyone that has donated, and I don't have to have anything to do with it.

BibleThump

Those are called whores, son.

And what is this a reference to?

If people want to watch a moderately attractive woman or former pornstar play League of Legends poorly then more power to them. I'm more of a Diddy Kong Racing speedrun and DotA 2 tournament guy myself, but different strokes for different folks.

And turning twitch chat off on popular twitch channels is one of the best feelings in the world.

I don't have any problem with it. The "good" stuff (the most watched) gets to the top, so you know what to expect depending and where you search

Basically, what people want will come out on top of everything else. If that's a good looking women doing things in an exploitative way, so be it. You don't have to watch it, there's a reason for thumbnails being there, to give you an idea of what's going on there.

Also, Salty Bet is on Twitch, so it can't ever be wrong.

@spaceinsomniac said:

As long as they have Dansgaming's glorious cast, they'll be all right in my book.

As long as they have Dansgaming's glorious cast, they'll be all right in my book.

@vinchenzo: I wouldn't say this is "the Direction Twitch is Going". It's more like the direction some people using Twitch have taken. Though, many channels aren't fans of that kind of thing, and it likely will go down soon. What you described is certainly not as bad as the woman who actually writes donators' names on her body as an incentive.

Though, I honestly thought this was going to be about how Twitch is switching to HTML5 soon. That's going to be -huge-, as it will make it near impossible to avoid ads. At the moment, despite their high viewership numbers, most streamers are lucky to get a small fraction of those viewers to have any ads shown. Their shift to HTML5 is likely to be big, and it may just make Twitch streaming much more viable, even if it means people actually seeing ads.

Hey, seems like http://www.heightofthegame.com/chat has all your needs covered. You should totally check those guys out, they're really sexy and mad dope. You get the stunning thrills of live video content delivered directly to your eyeballs, with custom chat options such as QuakeNet Web IRC, Twitch chat or no chat room at all, gripping polls and splendiferous prizes. Simply stunning, I'm sure you'll agree.

Oh, and Giant Bomb do a Twitch sometimes, it's pretty good and their chat room sometimes has polls too, I guess.

Fattony, you self-promotional monster...

Never noticed any of that stuff. Granted, I only venture over to Twitch when Rorie's streaming Dark Souls or when Jared is streaming something (and I just started to watch his stuff).

Fuck you, I've been on Twitter for five years and got 63 followers, being a nice digital guy just doesn't get you fucking anywhere. Which is heartbreaking, because that's how I've tried to live my digital life since the 90s.

#digital

Also, no ads on Height of the Game.

#jeffgerstmannonblast

We're planning a new marathon charity gaming extravaganza soon, by the way, so that's mostly why I'm shouting about the URL.

#shitthatsakindofadvertising

This has been happening for years with a lot of people who stream whatever they want.
Even some of the most popular streamers are taking donations either through twitch subscribtions or setting up a website for it and then they give benefits to the people donating.
Play with the host in any game (multiplayer, co-op, whatever), merchandise, sometimes they give out free games just for being a paid subscriber to their twitch Channel(day9 does this)
Another streamer on there who's also making music and stuff like that plays with his community, streams for 3-4 hours a day and have longer sessions on weekends where people just have fun.
If you donate to his sit you get to download his music(like an album for 5 bucks) and get t-shirts, or mugs or whatever.

And I think that's alright.

Also the $5 Twitch Subscriber Chat that most of the streamers with a fully functional brain use is the most amazing thing ever.
Get rid of the unwanted lowlife on the internet or if they're really serious about trolling (and being banned from watching content and chatting) they can pay 5bucks to be an ass for a minute and then be gone forever. It's a fantastic system

Oh yeah, when are you planning to put together something? :)

Seems more honest then those old camgirls that would have links to their amazon wishlists

Like they always say ''nice guys finish last''

Really, all I want from twitch is a "old > new" option for past broadcasts. As it stands, every time I reload the page I need to scroll (and open) pages and pages of GiantBomb streams to get to the old ones. Which is a pain when you're trying to go through the backlog.

BionicBunion

As long as twitch fixes their issues with chat/lag, I'm down for whatever.

This is my opinion with Twitch.

I think overall the idea is perfect, and spot on. But they need to make it a little easier for people trying to get immersed themselves for the first time. It seems at the moment with Twitch you get handicapped as a new user to only see what they want you to, and UI is beautiful, but not intuitive.

Their pushing for trying to get into native integration with games. At DMW in LA, I met with the head of video engineering from Twitch, and it seemed promising, but what if performance were to slow on twitch, how does that affect your games performance? There are some assurances they could not do without.

Frank Cefalu - Creator of Animus Interactive & Kingdom of Knights

The only thing I want from Twitch is for streams to not fucking stutter. I have 80mbit internet, I am fairly sure I can handle some 5mbit stream.

@alexw00d: Alex it may be not Twitch but the stream provider. If their connection is not good to output the stream it will be jumpy coming to you. Unforunately, everyone with a wall jack DSL connection thinks they can suddenly stream.

Frank Cefalu - Creator of Animus Interactive & Kingdom of Knights

@fcefalu: Most cases I'll be watching streams at the same time as other people, and they won't be stuttering, but mine will, and then other times their's is stuttery and mine isn't. It's weird.

Boob CPM.

Boob CPM.

MAX CPM

PJSalt, BibleThump, BionicBunion and no Kappa!?!?

For shame!

Also, some of the ladies of twitch are alright, Ms_Vixen, despite her name, is a pretty damn good CoD player...better than i'll ever be.. and is legitimately a blast to listen to. Also, don't blame the girls for the donations...it's a failing on the guy's part if he's got more dollars than sense.

I remember there was an Arabian prince or something that donated like $10,000 to a 14 year-old girl.

@redelectric: lol

Frank Cefalu - Creator of Animus Interactive & Kingdom of Knights

Yeah this is really all I want. Of the big three, twitch has by far the worst quality/most stuttery streams. LIke wayy behind ustream and youtube.

Legitimate or not, people are going to support what they like. You might not agree with it but so long as someone wants to see it they're going to keep their channel going. If you don't want to see it, just go to another one.

I don't think it hurts other streamers. If they don't get someones attention or backing it just means they're not providing what the viewer wants to see... Which in your example appears to be boobs.

It wasn't very nice of you to upload Giantbomb content to your own youtube channel. You are not a nice digital guy.

Twitch doesn't impress me - the sad truth is that twitch is still the "best" streaming site, and that is less a compliment to their site, as the sad state of streaming websites across the internet.

When I first got into streams - on Ustream and later Justin.tv (which is the same as twitch) they had some nice features.

- I could search with keywords. I frequent a community around a website called the Backloggery, which has a group of people with small streams, purely for fun. We could tag our streams, and do a quick search to see all of these streams without having to follow each one. It was very convenient to be able to provide a link that listed everyone on the site who was currently streaming. JTV removed this feature a couple years ago, with no real explanation.

- I could highlight parts of streams. I could cut out a portion of an archive stream and save the video on my channel. Streamers could turn this feature on or off. Now I have to go through a complicated process, and add people individually if I want to allow them to do this.

-Twitch has horrible servers. During peak hours, streams can lag, streams might not load, chat will go down. This has been a problem for over a year now. And direct from console streaming will only make it worse, if they don't fix these problems. When there's a big LoL tournament, every other stream on twitch might suffer for the increased load, as twitch doesn't keep enough hardware to handle everything. Likewise, back on justin.tv, "illegal" football streams would bring the servers to their knees every sunday afternoon.

I like watching small streams, and I like streamers that interact with their viewers. If i'm in a chat room with a couple hundred people spamming faces, I feel like I might as well just be watching it at higher quality on youtube.

For people like me, Twitch has grown steadily worse over the past two years. I don't really blame them for chasing the eSports ad money - theyre a business, and League of Legends is a cash cow right now. The speed running and fighting communities have their own big streams, also sources of revenue for Twitch.

Personally, I find some of their fundraising efforts to be a bit distasteful (webcam girls, just no.) and often you'll hear of huge scams run by streamers (the Diablo player in a wheelchair that could actually walk just fine) which really gives me no sense of trust, and it's unlikely i'll send any money to a streamer as a result.

I do whitelist their ads, however - I am fine with video ads when they aren't being shoved on top of content, making me miss it. Most streamers are pretty good about placing these ads at appropriate times.

But I will be happy if a smaller site pops up that wants to offer people like me a home, that won't suffer massive lag and outages every time some big event is happening.

Giantbomb and salty bet are all i need twitch for

@marokai: The weird, and ironic thing is that same interface is not even being used in the iOS app (not sure with Android). Also you can't even watch the streams on iOS if you are using the browser version since its in Flash anyways.

I only watch GB streams on Twitch, but I wish I could rewind them like on Youtube.

Twitch got a bloodied tooth from their popularity and the fact that people actually subscribe, went to focus on monetizing, added a feature that makes it more attractive to subscribe to individual streamers to bring them more cash.

Yet they can't code an applet that doesn't have to have the volume doubleclicked muted and back to end up at full proper volume. They can't figure out why you have to scale up to 720+ to get a stable stream sometimes. Their chat servers are counted on a single hand.

They'd save themselves a lot of work by limiting incoming and outgoing bitrates to a decent level. They'd do a lot of good by adding a tag based browsing system like mentioned in a good earlier post here. I pay 525 yen a month for nicovideo and get their version of Xsplit for it, and despite the 384kbps and 30 minute unless paying for extensions limit they are universes ahead of Twitch in really, every field but bitrate maximums. It isn't jam packed with 30 second unskippable video-ads either.

I'd deliver good word about uStream if I knew how they were doing at the moment. Twitch isn't going to get any better with what's on their schedule, I've got three people working for them to super-anonymously back me up. Just keep watching their official blogs and comments, praying they move away from "let's make money" and focus more on "let's do something good for users and prospective users".

There you go. They're not victims or abusers, they're just offering a product and if people buy it, then that's their choice.

Personally I won't ever quite understand it, if only because when I want to see ladies being sexy for my entertainment, that's what porn is for. When I want to watch ladies or gentlemens play video games well, I probably won't watch Twitch camwhores.

Fuck you, I've been on Twitter for five years and got 63 followers, being a nice digital guy just doesn't get you fucking anywhere.

Digital friend zone!

Twitch needs to hurry up and make a new player with html 5 support, so I can watch premium GB live streams on my nexus 7.