May 28, 2014 • 51 mins
What is Twitch and why is Google so interested in it? We take a closer look at the video streaming service giving gamers huge audiences.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from half
stuff dot com either everyone, and welcome to text stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren. Before we get into this,
I just want to alert listeners ahead of time. I've
got a cold, so I'm going to sound a little weird.
(00:24):
He's kind of raspy. Is it's a little bit tom? Wait? Yeah,
you know the piano has been drinking and Jonathan has
been on an airplane. So that's where we're at. Today's
episode is brought to us courtesy of a little listener mail.
This one is from Daniel via actual email. Yeah, apparently
people still use that. By the way, guys, we've seen
(00:46):
a big upswing and listener and email and Facebook and Twitter.
We love it. Keep up the great so so much.
We're sending we We love every single note that we receive.
Even if we are too incredibly stressed out to respond
to all of you. We love you, Thank you so much.
I'm trying desperately to get through all the backlogs, so
if you have written, I am working my way back
to you, babe. Anyway, Daniel, he wrote to us to say,
(01:08):
I don't know if you did this before, but we've
recently had the news then online gaming streaming service called
Twitch is surpassing live streaming services like you Stream, w
w E Network live Stream, and other streaming services by volume. However,
I don't really hear about it outside of gamer groups,
which is odd to me. Can you all get into
the details about how Twitch works, or maybe into live
(01:30):
streaming in general. It's a growing trend in recent years.
I can only see getting bigger as gaming audiences grow.
You know what, Daniel, We agree it's a great topic.
It's one that's become incredibly important as of the week.
We're recording this podcast because they're Okay. So there's this
rumor going around, and at this point it's a very
strong rumor, although the parties that are involved are still
(01:52):
not commenting officially on it, that Google in the form
of YouTube is interested in purchasing Twitch for a billion dollars.
So this was a story broken by Variety originally, and
then it was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal, although
again no one from either Twitch nor Google is is
commenting on the subject. By the time this podcast comes out,
(02:14):
it may very well be that all of this is
supremely old news and that the the deal has either
been agreed upon or declined, but we don't as we're
recording this, don't know the outcome al right where we
are recording this on May twenty and um, and yeah,
these these two sources. By the way, Variety in the
Wall Street Journal reported different stories, um that the sale
(02:37):
is already certain, or that the talks are in early stages,
and that Twitch might just sell stake in their company
instead of selling the entire company as a whole. Right,
And even though official sources are not doing any talking
about it right now, anonymous sources have done a lot
of talking. For for example, Verage reported that other companies,
including Microsoft we're also according Twitch, but have been turned down. Um.
(02:59):
At any rate, It's it's a really interesting news item
for for both the gaming industry and the live streaming industry.
And I guess video on the internet as a whole, yeah,
And keeping in mind that video on the internet is
still a very young thing. I mean, it wasn't that
long ago that you didn't have any sort of video
hosting services. And the way you would get video on
the internet is that someone would save a video file
(03:22):
and you'd have to download the whole thing to watch it.
So this is a this is kind of showing the
next step in in the the world of video online.
So we've got the prerecorded stuff, which YouTube has got
pretty sewn up at least for user generated. Then you've
got the pre record stuff that is made by studios
and television networks. Now that's all over the place like Netflix, Hulu,
(03:44):
all that kind of stuff. And then you have broadcast
where you're doing a live streaming event, which is what
Twitch and other services like Twitch are all about. So
how does that work? Why is it such a big
deal of why why would Google even be interested in it?
A lettle in one billion dollars worth of interest in Yeah,
So we thought we would first go into a little
bit of history. We like to always look back into
(04:06):
how things became what they are. So let's, uh, let's
just think we're not going to get into the way
back machine because this is pretty recent history. Lauren and
I both lived through this history. It wasn't going on
immediately around us, but we were technically alive while it
was happening, yes, which is relatively rare for the two
of us. For lots of the history that we do
on this show. Yeah, there was a period in when
(04:26):
I was dead to the world. So anyway, Twitch is
kind of a first of all, it's a spinoff of
another company. It's so in order to understand where Twitch
came from, you have to go back a little further
and look at the origin of this other company, Justin
TV exactly who, which was founded by Justin Cohn, Emmett Sheer,
Michael Cybel, and Kyle Vauched. And so here's the thing.
(04:48):
Even that company was the product of some other some
other work done by this group of people that didn't
work out so much. You see, you had this group
who created a web calendar software called Keiko. This was
from a group who had gone to Yale together I think,
and formed the company soon after graduation. And so they
(05:11):
were approached by a brand new seed company called y Combinator.
And a seed company is all about finding startups to
to finance, to fund, hoping that those startups will blossom
and therefore those investments will end up making huge returns
in return. You also see these companies that otherwise might
(05:31):
not have a chance grow into something really interesting. Right.
Part of that same batch was both Reddit and Infogami,
which is one of those companies that was started by
Aaron Schwartz. Yeah, so amazing group of people, right, So
not just the smarty pants folks behind Kiko, but these
other groups as well. I mean, Reddit is now one
of the more popular sites on the Internet has a
(05:53):
flourishing community, although it's a community that has its own
uh issues and in fighting. Well yeah, I think the
more popular Reddit gets, the more irritated the hardcore audience.
But the same thing happened to dig so it'll be
interesting to see what happens with Reddit. But that's a
totally different podcast. So here's the thing about kiko um.
(06:14):
It was, according to Justin con himself, not that great
of a product, and the reason he gave behind that
was that he and his fellow programmers didn't really need
a calendar. He said, I was going to college, I
had two classes, I had classes on on two days
of the week, and otherwise I was sitting around programming.
So what the heck do I need a schedule for?
(06:36):
It does not useful to me. So since I didn't
need it, I wasn't using it, and since I don't
use it, the products we were making weren't very compelling.
And then Google calendar comes out and everyone's like, well,
so they decided what we're gonna do is we're gonna
sell this company for as much as we can so
that we can pay back our investors and then constrate
(06:56):
something else. So of course, they sold their company the
way any sane person would. They listed it on eBay,
and it's sold on eBay for some two and fifty
eight thousand dollars to a Canadian company called two Cows
to Cows. Two Cows. Yeah, yeah, they have two cows,
twice as many cows as someone who has one cow.
So yeah, except its spelled t u c ows, but yeah,
(07:20):
it's it's It was funny because they were going for
just fifty dollars. They wanted fifty grand. They were hoping
they could get fifty grand so they could pay off
their investors, and then they saw that it had hit
eighty grand and they thought, oh, we got some walk
in money now, and it finally sold for two eight
thousand dollars on eBay. All right, yeah, yeah, two two
cows and a calendar app that. Yeah, that's great. I
(07:42):
had no idea you could actually list a company on eBay,
and the idea that that's involved in the terms of
service blows my mind. Anyway, they successfully sell Keiko, and
in two thousand seven, Justin and Emmett pitched this idea
of justin dot TV to Paul Graham. Paul Graham was
the guy who founded the y Combinator Seed company, and
(08:05):
the premise originally was not for some sort of live
broadcast uh service for the general public, all right, It
was sort of a curiosity. The idea was to just
put a webcam um basically on on Kan's head and
have it broadcast twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week. So I think that he was doing so
it was justin TV, justin TV, right, it was. It
(08:26):
was like it was a kind of life casting, except
instead of having the camera turned back on himself, it
was more or less from his perspective and view. Yeah, yeah,
there's some great stories about weird things that happening. Within
the first week of going live, apparently his audience felt
that it was not the most compelling of of entertainment,
(08:47):
that watching a guy sit in an apartment and code
was not necessarily the most interesting subject matter, that it
needed a little bit of spice, so um, so they
provided it to the audience. Provided the spice this is
where you know, it's kind of like when you hear
about a news outlet making the news. In this case,
it was the audience making the contact content. How do
they make the content? They contact the police and say
(09:10):
that there was a report of a stabbing incident in
Justin Kahn's apartment. So the police pay a little visit.
By the way, this entire incident is preserved on YouTube
if you want to watch it. And so you hear
the cops knocking at the door, they come inside. They
explained that they got a report about stabbing. Pretty quickly,
(09:30):
Justin figures out, Hey, the it's our users who have
decided that this is this would be entertaining to watch.
What a bunch of scamps um. There were other incidents
that were similar, where they would call in fake fires
and there were like six or seven fire trucks lined
outside of Justin's apartment legally culpable scamps that. Yeah, So
(09:52):
eventually they decided, hey, you know this, Uh, this idea
isn't working because Justin's just not interesting enough off to
keep everyone's attention. Uh. There are other incidents as well.
There are plenty of videos online that explained the hijinks
these guys got up to But what happened was they
decided this isn't sustainable, it's not entertaining, So what can
(10:14):
we do. How can we modify what we've built into
something that actually resonates with people. So they revisit the
idea and they discussed different approaches, and they came up
with this idea of using the justin TV as a
platform for other people to broadcast things live over the Internet.
So this was the democratization of live broadcast. YouTube had
(10:37):
created the democratization of of sharing video. But but you didn't.
You couldn't do live events on YouTube at the time,
So what would where would you go if you wanted
to have like a live call in show, for example,
and you were using maybe Skype for people to call
in so that you could answer questions live on the air,
(10:58):
You didn't really have that option. But because people couldn't
hear you and then respond to you in real time,
twitch or not twitch. But justin TV was a chance
of doing that. So it's kind of interesting. They said
that the only reason they were able to do it
is because while they had been developing justin dot tv, uh,
they had advanced the technology to a point that brought
(11:18):
the cost of streaming video down significantly to just like
a couple of cents or a couple of fractions of
assent UH for a minute of video, which was important
because you know, depending upon how much bandwidth you were using,
your I s P might be charging you quite a
bit for it. Oh sure, but at that rate, with
a combination of advertising revenue from from ads and also
(11:42):
money from investors, they could kind of plug along, yeah exactly.
The ad supported videos helped them recapture some of the costs,
and they also got some pretty significant funding, like their
their first round UH netted them about two million dollars.
They would later get I think twenty million a couple
of years down the road. So they were getting money
from investors who said, this is the future of this
(12:06):
kind of internet delivery system. Plus they were thinking ahead
of how can we monetize this so that once once
we get past that investment period, how do we keep
making money? And that was through the ad support, So
they began to think, how can we really make it
easier for people to find the stuff they want? Because
as more people join, it gets crowded, right, and you're like, well,
(12:27):
there's a ton of people on here, but I'm only
interested in one specific topic. Uh. And so they started
to make categories and things like people who wanted to
talk about business, or people who wanted to talk about fashion,
or people wanted to talk about sports or video games,
and the video games category began to get incredibly popular,
something that mystified justin by the way you can watch
(12:50):
video interviews, and he said, I just didn't get it.
People were playing video games and streaming their video game
experience online and other people were watching it. What's up
with that? He just he was like, I didn't understand it,
but I realized that other people found it valuable, So
we knew that it was something we had to look at.
So they start thinking, well, you know, this makes a
(13:11):
lot of sense. We've we've got all these people who
are um watching stuff. We should try and take advantage
of that. So they ultimately on June six, two eleven,
launched twitch dot tv in public beta as a completely
separate brand. Now, this was the idea of let's take
that video game content that everyone is streaming and create
(13:34):
a product specifically for that, with tools built in to
help people do that more smoothly, so they don't have
to create their own system at home to make it work.
We're going to try and integrate it in as many
different approaches as possible so that more people can do this,
because it's clearly a runaway success story, and it made
much more sense to create a new brand than to
(13:55):
just nestle it under justin dot tv. In fact, Twitch
dot tv was getting bigger than just dot tv. Yeah,
they they basically immediately found an audience. They started with
some three point two million unique visitors per month. Yep. Yeah,
they they've increased that a little bit. Yes, about a
year later, they would hit twenty million unique visitors per month. Yeah,
(14:17):
and I think they're at forty five million currently, so
it is essentially doubled, like year over year, more than
doubled on that first one. So that was pretty impressive.
And you know, keep in mind that back in June
two th eleven, it was just in beta. It wasn't
even the full release yet. So they started having lots
of Like there's certain games that that definitely drove participation,
(14:39):
StarCraft too being a big one. Anything that you can
get big tournaments going for exactly. So, and you know
there are places like in South Korea where StarCraft tournaments are,
like the super Bowl is here in the United States,
so you get these enormous crowds live audiences watching these
well only here in the US. It just it never
really caught on that way, mostly because production costs or
(15:02):
something like that. If you wanted to televise it, we're
so high that you would have trouble getting the audience
large enough to justify that expense. But the overhead for
Twitch is way lower. I mean, you don't have as
many employees for one thing, the infrastructure is once you've
made the investment, much less expensive than television. So it
(15:26):
was sort of the perfect platform for that and it
really took off. It also allows the audience to talk
to each other during the event in a way that
the normal broadcast television obviously doesn't allow unless you invite
a lot of your friends over right, or you have
some app where you can watch the show and talk
with other fans. But we've seen this over and over
that television makes it. It's really hard to get something
(15:49):
like that to work from a television platform and poured
it over into an online interactive platform. Usually you see
people just use either Twitter or Facebook for that kind
of thing, right, And in eleven that wasn't so much
the case quite yet, No, no, you know, so this
in this case, you have a platform that by its
very nature allows for that kind of thing. However, as
(16:09):
of eleven it's still was not profitable and would not
become I think it technically has never been profitable for
a full year. They are estimating that as it will be, right,
But well, well we'll see. You have to get that
great balance of AD dollars and user base in order
(16:30):
to make it profitable. And of course the bigger it gets,
the more of an investment you have to make in
the company's infrastructure. Right. Of course, us a few things
that helped out greatly with that. Yeah. Yeah. For one thing,
you've got the fact that both Sony and Microsoft gave
Twitch a big thumbs up. Right, they announced partnerships that
(16:52):
would allow a native app on both of those gaming
platforms to integrate Twitch tv. Right. So, with the case
of of PlayStation four, there's a button on the controller
where you can start sharing what you're playing. It's a
little more complex with Xbox one. Uh. And in both
cases it was a feature that was not immediately implemented
as soon as the consoles came out, but was implemented
(17:13):
a little bit later on the life cycle of those consoles,
I say life cycle, and these things haven't even been
out a full year yet. Yeah, it's really interesting to
see that they were throwing their support behind this because
they could see both Sony and Microsoft could see that
this this was a trend that was growing, that people
were eager to share their experiences and more people were
(17:34):
eager to to eat it all up. So I mean,
I've watched play throughs online. Of course, the playthroughs I
watched tend to be done for for comedic purposes, where
it's a bunch of guys who are playing who know
each other really well, and they're really doing it as
a way of entertaining other people, Like that's the whole
purpose of it. They're not playing a game competitively against others,
(17:55):
which is what a lot of the Twitch TV stuffs for.
Not everything, but also you have you have streamed yourself
on Twitch, haven't you? I did. I did for twenty
five hours straight. I did a stream of me just
playing Minecraft. It was for the Extra Life charity, which
raises money for to buy video games and video game
(18:15):
systems for kids who are in hospitals and uh, so
I was part of this. It was kind of like
a Pledge Drive type thing. And for twenty five hours
I played and and streamed it live, and I always
had at least one or two people watching. Sometimes I
would have you know, a few dozen watching at a time.
UH And I even had a thing where for certain
(18:36):
levels of contributions, I would build uh monuments within Minecraft,
and the more money you made, the bigger and more
rare the monument would be, like the materials would be
more rare. So some people were incredibly generous and I
had to go and find the rarest materials and Minecraft
(18:56):
within twenty five hours and still build it. Like actually,
I was like, all, so for the first eighteen hours,
I'm just mining and then for the last seven hours
I'll be building. So yeah, it was actually a lot
of fun. But because of Twitch, I was able to
stream it live and people could check in on me
and see that I was actually doing this thing that
I had said I would do. UM And I also,
(19:17):
you know, I got to have an ongoing conversation with
folks through chat. He would chat to me and I
would answer that questions live while playing and and kind
of keep you motivated while you were doing this ridiculous marathon.
Sometime around our number nineteen or twenty, I definitely needed
some more motivation. Not to mention coffee. I think that's
the wall that they talked about in Marathon ng UM.
In September, Twitch sold an undisclosed stake in the company
(19:39):
to investors, raising that twenty million dollars that you mentioned earlier,
and a lot of that went to supporting their rollout
into the PS four and Xbox one. Yeah. Now, if
you're looking at today's numbers, according to Mercury News that
this was astounding. Twitch dot tv accounts forty percent of
all United States live streaming online. That's more than any
(20:01):
other live streaming site, including ESPN, NBC Sports and YouTube Live. Um.
This is all according to Quilt, which is a company
that helps networks manage bandwidth demand for video online and
announced that they had begun working with Twitch in April.
Twitch tv receives more than forty million unique visitors each month,
(20:21):
which I think we mentioned before. But yeah, that's a lot.
Like sure, if you look at YouTube, YouTube is getting
a billion, okay, but YouTube has Google behind it and
is adding a hundred hours of footage every minute, right,
This is this is considering that this is something that
was a spinoff of another company and has only been
(20:41):
around for for less than four full years, it's phenomenal. Yeah,
and its users spend an average of a hundred and
six minutes per day watching streams average. That is also insane.
That's so not to spoil it, but that's going to
come into play when we have our conversation of why
the heck would Google wants to spend a billion dollars
on the yes. To put all of this in perspective
(21:01):
a little bit, In February, a company called deep Field,
which does Internet data analysis for media companies like the
Wall Street Journal, Ransom numbers and reported that Twitch accounts
for one point eight percent of United States peak internet traffic,
which places it fourth overall after Netflix, which stands at
Google and Apple four point three. That also puts it
(21:24):
ahead of companies like Hulu, Facebook, and Valve, all of
which come in a couple tents of a percentage point lower.
That's pretty amazing. I mean, now, granted, these are all
different things, right because with Google, the fact that is
Google is pretty impressive considering that that's it's text based. Yeah, yeah,
it's not just uh, I mean, I guess Google that
(21:46):
probably also includes YouTube, so that's probably some video in
there too. But yeah, it's still impressive. The fact that
Valve is so far back is also impressive because you're
talking about like not just uh, online gaming, but that's
a gaming delivery service, you know, if people are buying
games on Steam. But um, yeah, still pretty impressive. Well,
we're gonna next tackle exactly how this whole system works,
(22:11):
but before we do that, let's take a quick break
to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back. Let's talk
about how this company actually delivers live streaming. That was
Daniel's question, how does it work? Now? A lot of
live streaming is using a very similar method, But first
it's good to say what it does not do, right,
because it's an intrinsically different system than for example, YouTube. Yeah,
(22:34):
so YouTube, you've got prerecorded user videos for the most part.
I mean, YouTube has some live stuff now, but the
bulk of its business is prerecorded video. So with that,
I would, for example, if I were uploading a video,
it would upload to YouTube, then it processes and it's
stored on YouTube servers actually usually multiple servers. Redundancy. Hey,
(22:56):
we said at the same time, we were being redundant.
So we're trying to it serve it up from a disk.
You know. That's YouTube actually pulls the video from some
saved part on some server or servers and serves it
up to you when you say I want to watch
this video now. That is completely different from the way
live streaming works. And one of the things that made
(23:18):
it possible was that, uh, this idea of peering networks.
So I'll get to that, but but also to explain
how peering networks are different, your basic uh server client
relationship is very centralized. You've got a server that has
all the information on it, and then you use a
client like a browser that then sends a query to
(23:40):
the server which says, oh, I know what you want,
you want this and sends it to you. Centralized right right,
And that means that if too many people are trying
to access that server at the same time, you're going
to run into a little bit of lags exactly, which
comes down on to your end because the server is
going to say, oh, hey, wait a minute, I'm doing
this other thing and this other thing, and and it
resolves and basically a load bar exactly. Yeah, the same
(24:03):
sort of thing. Like if Lauren had, uh, you know
she has she has cookies at her desk, and the
entire office comes to her at the same time to
get a cookie each It's gonna take a while because,
you know, it may be that she has a variety
of cookies and we each want a different type of cookies.
So Lauren, being Lauren, wants to be fair to everybody
and tries to make sure that this happens. But Lauren,
(24:25):
also being Lauren, gets overwhelmed with the fact that a
whole bunch of cookie hungry maniacs are approaching her and
wigs out. I mean, it just happens. So that would
be an issue of client server. So how can you
get around that. Well, if Lauren was able to clone
herself and every single version of Lauren had a box
of cookies, and all of the box of cookies had
identical types of cookies in them, like the whole variety,
(24:48):
we could all go to different Lauren's to get our cookies.
The interesting thing is that you know, they'd all have
exactly the cookie we would want. I want a cookie,
I like this bizarre university. Well that's the that's kind
of the nature of appearing. So the other issue here
is that if you have the prerecorded material, you can
do something called over subscribing bandwidth. Now, that just means
(25:10):
that you can serve more data than the network can
actually accommodate at any given time. So let's say that
I've got a five gigabyte limit on how much data
i can push out at any given time, but I've
got seven gigabytes of demand, all right. The way that
over subscription works is that I send out messages that
tell all the different clients that are trying to access
my stuff. Hey, I'm getting to you. Here's some of
(25:33):
the information. More of its coming right now, but just
just you know what, do a little song and dance
for the user. That's when you get the little buffer thing. Right.
So with YouTube, if a video is buffering mainly, that
just means that the service has a lot of traffic
and it's trying to serve all of that traffic at
the same time. So you're getting bits and bits of
data that are buffering slowly, so that once you hit
(25:56):
a certain threshold, you can push play and watch your
video and everything goes well, yeah, exactly. Hypothetically, exactly. Yeah,
if if, if it has buffered enough, you can push
play and you can watch the video all the way
through because at that point you're getting data faster than
the video is completing. Now, anyone who's ever seen video
buffer in the middle of a video know that that
(26:16):
knows that that doesn't always work, you know. Sometimes it's
just one of those things where the playback catches up
to the amount of data that's come in and you
have to wait longer. Okay, so how is how is
this peering structure different? Alright? So it's decentralized. So instead
of having that centralized server that all the different clients
are contacting, you have a system, a network architecture where
(26:40):
multiple servers are using copies of the same sort of thing,
and all of them can take on a part of
the work. So instead of one server where you you know,
you're just souping it up as fast as it can
go so it can work as best as it possibly can,
you distribute it across an entire network. Google actually does
this for their search, So for a Google Search query,
(27:02):
they have an entire network of servers that work together.
That's why if you ever do that Google search and
you look and it says it took point zero zero
zero zero zero eight three seconds to to answer this query.
That's why, because I've got this distributed network, So just
think of it as a group of people all taking
some of the load so that no one server is overworked. Now,
(27:26):
these servers can be located in different data centers, which
could be all the way across the world. They don't
have to be co located with anything or next to
each other. And because of this, you've got these individual
nodes which have this peering architecture that they're they're the peers,
so that each individual server is a peer in this
peering architecture, and they act as both suppliers and consumers
(27:49):
of resources. So each peer makes part of its computer
resources available to the other peers. This is that sharing,
that distribution of the load of any given computer request.
So this way you can get a bunch of you know,
average servers together and network them together and get a
better performance than if you just invest in that one
super fast server. It also makes it cheaper because you
(28:11):
can just get off the shelf parts to build your
servers instead of buying you know, the next ultra fast exactly.
So it and Again, this is also what allows you
to be have a lot of redundancy because you can
you can get a bunch of inexpensive parts as opposed to, well,
we blew all our money on this one really fast
machine that can't live up to our expectations. So what
(28:32):
happens I mean, because I'm sure that with the number
of people who are using this service, what happens if
demand exceeds even this capacity? Okay, so if there were
no overflow method, you would all get a buffering message
at the same time. Because all of these servers are
working together. It's this whole It's like it's an all
or nothing kind of situation. Now. Uh, the the peak
(28:55):
use of Twitch was something like ten times the amount
of the average use, which meant that they had to
build a network that could withstand ten times the normal
use at least, and in fact, you want to have
more than that to have a comfortable buffer. But even
if it goes beyond that. This is something they've learned
from their just in TV days, they wanted the ability
(29:17):
to have an overflow capacity where they use something called
a content delivery network or c d N. Now, this
is a specific type of business. It's a distributed system
of servers, so again sort of appeering network, but this
is kind of appeering network for higher So you would
use this if you wanted to create content and you
want to be able to distribute it to a wide
(29:39):
audience on a live basis. This is the sort of
approach you would want to take. And this is what
some companies like Netflix, they depend upon the sort of
networks to deliver the stuff that they make. Some companies
invest in their own, like twitch tv has its own network,
but again, if it exceeds that capacity, they can then
say tap the shoulder of the c d N and
(29:59):
say can you take over some of this stuff. Now,
for these cases, it does mean that the company, whether
it's twitched TV or some other media company, has to
pay for those services. You know, it's not a free thing,
but it does mean that there's at least a safety
net there. Should Let's say that that there's some huge
event that happens on twitch tv that really gets the
(30:21):
entire gaming world interested and they all want to watch
it at the same time live streaming, then they might
need to use that kind of resource because the demand
would exceed the capacity. They also developed a load balancing
software called Usher to help out a little bit in
in high demand situations like that, Yeah, this is really
(30:43):
really cool stuff. So Usher is kind of the the
the traffic manager. Right. Usher identifies what requests are and
how to fulfill those requests in what in other words,
how how many servers it needs to call upon in
order to handle the demand that's coming in. Right, So,
let's say that I'm going to stream the playing uh,
(31:04):
I don't know, some game, like I'm gonna go back
and play through some of the Halo games and I'm
gonna stream them live. Now, in that case, there's probably
not going to be a huge demand. There aren't that
many people who are that interested in watching a bald
guy fail miserably at playing Halo. Um until you try,
that's true. But I'm assuming that this would not be
(31:24):
one that Usher would be like ho Alert the media.
So Usher, when getting the message that I'm going to
stream this video and then analyzing how much of the
resources available we're going to be necessary for to deliver
upon that would contact various servers to make sure that
it was covered. And usually we're talking about a capacity
(31:45):
that exceeds what it expects for the demand. Now, if
it were some uh star Craft two champions that never
faced each other before, and they were going to have
a tournament style game against each other to determine who
is the true champion StarCraft Too. That could be huge,
and Usher would then make that determination and contact the
(32:05):
various servers that would all be copying the stream so
that they could share it up to UH to anyone
that would wanted to watch it. So then you've got
all these different factors that come into play that Usher
will take into considerations, So not just how popular are
the stream is going to be, but how much is
it gonna cost to serve up the live video? Because
(32:27):
like I said, bandwidth is not necessarily free. And Usher
can sit there and look and say which one of
these options is going to be the cheapest. Now, in
some cases, like with that StarCraft Too example, cheapest may
not be the best response because they want to make
sure that their customers, the viewers, are satisfied. So they
might say, all right, you know what, We're gonna incur
(32:48):
a cost on this, but what we want to do
is make sure we have the lowest latency possible so
that people who are watching are not experiencing like a
thirty second lag behind the action, so then sure can
prioritize on the fly. And it apparently the controls here
are incredibly precise so that you can tweak exactly which
(33:09):
things are the most important for any given situation. So
it's very versatile in that way, which I thought was
really really cool. Now every single server in that peer
network can actually act as two different things. It can
act as an edge server or it can act as
an origin server. So edge servers these are the machines
that are actually serving up the video streams that we're watching.
(33:30):
So if you log into twitch tv so that you
can watch someone else, you're getting that video feed from
an edge server. Now, the person who is making that
video is sending it to what is called an origin server.
That's the that's the machine that's accepting the incoming video,
so it can distribute it to the edge servers. And
because all the machines can do either role, it makes
it an incredibly flexible approach to delivering live video. And
(33:53):
that's why twitch dot tv works. If it had a
designated origin server and then designated servers, you would be
limited by that capacity. Now, if you could actually visualize
all these connections it would look very much like a tree.
So as people start to tune into a particular video stream,
you would have more and more branches forming off of
(34:15):
the trunk of that tree, so that those servers would
be able to deliver up the video most effectively to
those users. Because of course users aren't centralized either, right,
You could have users from all over the world tuning
in for any given video stream. So you want to
make sure that you can deliver the video stream the
best possible way to any individual user, uh, in the
(34:36):
way that it's going to make financial sense. So I mean,
that's why Usher, I thought, is so impressive because it
can take all that into account. Now, how is this
actually working on the back end? Like what's going on?
So with YouTube, you know you're saving two disk, but
with Twitch you aren't Twitch and justin TV do not
save video to a disk to serve it up. They
(34:59):
save the video stream within the server's memory. So the
video that's going to the origin server is saved and
its memory, it is making copies of that video stream
as it's being generated, sends those copies to the edge servers.
Those copies stay in the edge server's memory, which then
make a copy of that stream and send it to
(35:20):
the clients, the browsers that people are using to watch
the video stream. So it's copies and copies and copies.
Now that's not to say that they don't save this
information to disk. They do, but that's for archival purposes,
so you can go back and watch a video that's
been recorded previously. But it's not that that disk saving
things is what's coming into play here exactly while you're
(35:42):
watching it live. It has nothing to do with the
fact that it's also being saved to disk. That's that's
a completely separate thing that's going on. So when you're
watching your browser, your your client is sending in a
request via HTTP, so hypertext protocol good, all fun stuff.
(36:03):
We'll do an episode on it someday, I promise. But anyway,
it sends the HTTP request and Usher then accepts the
request because you know, he's a good guy. Uh, then
he decided I'm sorry, I'm thinking the software Usher decides
which server to connect you to, which edge server you
would be connected to, and then the video servers themselves,
they're they're very simple. They're just either acting as edge
(36:24):
or origin servers, so they're not making this determination at all.
That's all the usher software stuff, so and multiple data centers.
The data centers are actually located in proximity to major
peering exchanges on the Internet. Now, appearing exchange is not
the same thing as peer to peer networks. It's two
different concepts. Appearing exchange is a point on the Internet
(36:48):
where two major networks end up connecting to each other.
So remember the Internet is a network of networks, right,
So when you've got two big networks, like two big
Internet service provid witers for example, to have a connection point,
the purpose for that is to allow stuff that came
from one network to cross over and enter another network.
(37:10):
And these period exchanges their agreements essentially that say, hey,
as long as you let the stuff that comes from
my network travel across your network, all of the stuff
that comes from your network travel across my network, and
we're all even, Stephen. Now, this is one of the
points that net neutrality really makes important. They say, this
relationship is why we don't have to worry about any
(37:33):
particular part of the network holding the rest of the
Internet hostage by saying, if you want your traffic to
travel on my network, you're gonna have to pay me
x amount of money per x amount of data. That
would be bad. That would that would I mean it
would be bad. It would break the Internet the way
we have it today because you would make an uneven
(37:54):
playing ground, and if other networks followed suit, it would
just become this thing where you would have your the
the stuff you would have access to would be completely
dependent upon what originated on your network, who how much,
or who wasn't paying who? Yeah. Yeah, So that's anyway
again tangential. But the reason why the peering exchanges are
(38:15):
important is that by putting your data centers close to
peering exchanges, you have a much closer connection to individual networks.
Because this is kind of like the crossroads. If you're
able to plant yourself near the crossroads, you can connect
to all those different roads that split off from it
very easily. It's a very strategic move on the part
of Justin dot tv and Twitch dot tv. So really
(38:35):
the only thing left to talk about is the user experience.
You've got a browser, You've got a embettable player inside
that browser. That's what's handling the incoming video to play
it on your your screen. Same sort of thing is
like an inbettable YouTube player or blit TV, I mean,
any of those inbeatable players are doing the basic same thing.
That's just that's just the interface that allows you to
(38:58):
watch whatever the data is. So really there's not a
whole lot going on the client side. There's some load
balancing stuff that comes from the client side, but not
by not a whole lot. Most of it's on the
back end. Um and and same thing for the broadcaster.
There's not a whole lot going on that the broadcaster
has to manage. They basically just turn on their webcam
and to use the client and go. Yeah, you might
have to have a little extra software depending upon where
(39:20):
your video is coming from, like UH. For example, when
I needed to stream when I was playing Minecraft on
the PC UH and I needed to stream that online,
I had to download another piece of software that would
allow me to take the video from the game and
upload it to twitch Live. But there are lots of
different ways of doing that. And then when you've got
(39:40):
things like the Xbox one and the PS four, it's
incorporated directly into the consoles through the firmware, so that
one that's taken care of it for you. Right. This
ease of usability, I think is why it is in
fact so stink and popular. Um and and you know
there's that forty five million unique users per month that
we mentioned earlier is really is nothing to sneeze. No,
that's huge. And and and it's not just that there are
(40:02):
a lot of them. It's like the other thing you
pointed out, Lauren, it's there's a lot of them that
are watching a really long time. Yeah. They boast that
per week as a fall that was more viewers than
Breaking Bed, Tosh point O and the NFL preseason combined.
That's yeah, I mean that's a significant audience. And you know,
again they're really engaged. I mean, if I go to
(40:24):
YouTube and I'll watch a video, a lot of those
videos tend to be three to ten minutes long. You know,
there's some that are longer, and I'll watch those two
depending upon what I'm interested in. You go, maybe a
link along the side catches your eye and you watch
something else, but probably you're going to click away. Yeah,
you don't necessarily stay there for you know, more than
one or two videos. If you do, I mean, that's
cool too, but that's probably not the average person's experience.
(40:47):
You know, like a lot of people watch a YouTube
video when it's embedded in something else like a Facebook post.
The typical Twitch user, on the other hand, will stay
on the site for hours that that average of a
hundred and six minutes per day that we mentioned are earlier.
If that's an average, that means there are a lot
of people watching way longer than that. Oh right, yeah. Um,
And and the demographic that's going to twitch is a
(41:09):
really desirable one. The majority is under thirty five. I
think it's twenty one to twenty nine is the main,
main portion that that's the group of people that you say, hey,
these people buy stuff. Yeah, you've got lots of money
and you're probably willing to give it to me. Yeah,
so you aren't smart enough yet to know not to know.
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But yeah. And it's
(41:30):
also largely male, although there's a growing audience and broadcast
group of ladies as well. So we're starting to see
that that demographic is slowly changing. I mean, obviously gaming
has been very much male domin Yeah, but we're starting
to see a lot of females get into it because
they find gaming just as awesome of course, And and
(41:53):
as as the community changes and as the general standards
of the industry change, all of that is hopefully fingers
crossed going to change gender lines, right, So it's it's
again a growing market, So that's another reason why it's desirable.
But I mean that kind of engagement where you're going
to stay focused on something for on average a hundred
(42:14):
and six minutes. That is why Google is so interested
in in twitch dot tv. Not only is it lives,
not only have they done live streaming, and they've done
it well, they keep people there. Yeah. Yeah, as of now,
YouTube has really only been toying with live streaming. It
just opened their YouTube Live services up to the general
(42:37):
population in December and they haven't really done I mean,
it hasn't really seen that much traffic. Yeah. The only
other thing you can use is like the Google Hangouts,
where you can do a hangout broadcast and that ends
up broadcasting on YouTube as well, plus on Google Plus
and that kind of stuff. Um, and I've used that
a couple of times when I've been a guest on
other shows. Really I wasn't the one using it, they was.
(43:00):
I was participating in it. But yeah, it's still like
you said, it's a niche compared to someone like Twitch
dot tv that has just this huge audience. So what
would it mean if Google and Twitch joint forces to
rule the galaxy. Well, first of all, they might not
be able to. On a federal level, The Feds might
try to block this deal based on anti competition by saying, hey, Google,
(43:25):
you've already got YouTube, You've got you've got user generated
video sewn up pretty much. Yeah, you're the biggest content
player and you're trying to merge with the biggest content
streamer and that's really not okay. So that's a pity.
So that's a possibility. But if it goes through, it
would mean access to Twitch users to Google's incredible infrastructure,
um therefore improving the video quality and uh and lag
(43:47):
times that users are currently experiencing, which I mean Twitch
has said themselves that they were not prepared for the
kind of growth that they have seen and that it's
a fabulous problem to have. But yeah, it's still a problem.
It's still problem. So, like I said, Google has a
lot of experience with this kind of peering relationship, using
it for other things as well. So h So, in
(44:08):
at least on a philosophical level, it's from from architecture,
it's a good fit. I don't know how close twitches
architecture resembles that of Google on a practical level, but
philosophically they are very similar, right, and it's so it
could mean really good things there. It could hypothetically mean
more money for the people who are broadcasting. Twitch currently
(44:30):
has some four thousand partner casters who who are paid
for their casts. Yeah, when you get a certain number
of subscribers, you tend to get the attention of Twitch.
So let's say that you suddenly hits some new thousand subscribers,
which is going to say, hey, we should work together. Yeah,
this could be beneficial for everyone. Um, but Google could
(44:52):
possibly do even more for these content creators and if
nothing else, integrate more seamlessly with searching with YouTube, increasing
both ad revenue and audience participation. Alternately, it could mean
changes to the contracts of these professional live streamers, especially
considering YouTube's pretty strict policies about copyrighted material and on
(45:15):
region locking. Yeah. I mean a thing that a lot
of streamers do is they'll they'll have live music. Well
not live music. I don't think that they have a
band in their living right, but they have sometimes playing
in the background while they are playing a game, and
YouTube is not excited about that sort of thing. Well,
more importantly, the music in this reason not I'm not
excited about that. They don't necessarily want their music associated
(45:36):
with There's also some control issues, like Nintendo historically has
been very very protective of their of their video games,
and people who have put up, uh YouTube videos of
them playing the Nintendo games, a lot of them have
experienced takedown because Nintendo said, you know what, we want
(45:56):
to have full control of this experience. We don't like
the idea of other people being able to do that.
Nintendo started to ease up a little bit on that
more recently, but it's traditionally been an issue, and so
there's no guarantee that every single game publisher is going
to be totally cool. That's a whole that's a whole
other issue that I really wish that Nintendo would get with.
(46:19):
But back back on on the Google deal side, it
could hypothetically get other demographics than just gamers into this
live internet streaming kind of stick. Yeah, it's kind of
the whole purpose of justin dot tv in the first place.
But Twitch dot tv was the one that took that
was the part that took off off of justin dot tv.
And now now that people are getting more familiar or
(46:41):
aware of this, and also now that Twitch has grown
it into a very usable process, yeah, that we might
see more people get into this kind of live broadcast platform. Yeah,
for for events large and small, for for entertainment, maybe
for for science kind of discovery broadcasts, for news. I've
seen a couple of podcasts use this sort of thing
(47:04):
as to live stream when they were actually recording, so
you could follow along. Now, before any of you ask,
that's not gonna happen with us. I think in this
in this recording alone, we've stopped to cough about nineteen times.
I in fact, had to stop to cough before I
recorded this line. She actually started the line, stopped coughed. Yeah, no,
(47:25):
no one, no one wants that we both have congestion issues.
So yeah, if you guys were watching live right now,
it would be cough cough cough cough cough, three paragraphs
worth of information cough cough cough. Yeah, that that how
it works. Section took us forever because of me, So yeah,
we will not be doing that. And even when we're
feeling well, still not doing it so, but but at
(47:47):
any rate, I mean, you know this, this could this
could hypothetically change television as we know it. This could
be the bridge between network broadcasts and internet viewing. Yeah,
we could actually see very re regionalized approaches to stuff
as well as you know, more global appeal kind of broadcasts.
I've seen some communities do kind of a local news
(48:10):
broadcast for that community. This sort of thing would allow.
It's kind of like the public access in that sense,
and that it's a live way to communicate information out
whether it's entertainment or educational or news or whatever. You
can do that on a specific schedule. The other advantageos,
of course, it does record the videos, so even if
(48:31):
you aren't able to tune in live, you can still
watch it, which gives an advantage over other types of
live broadcasts. Sure, and it's it's on demand all the time.
It's on the internet. Anyone in the world hypothetically can
tune into this. Yeah. So let's say that you move
away from your hometown, but you want to keep tabs
on it. That could potentially be a way of that happening.
Or if one performer becomes very popular and and explodes
(48:54):
across you know, into other communities. That's wonderful. We're still
waiting make us explode people, you know, in popularity that is, yes, please,
thank you. Most of my atoms where they are. Yeah,
I'm pretty fond of where my my constituent atoms happen
to be as well. So anyway, that's that's the lowdown
on Twitch dot tv. It'll be really interesting to see
(49:16):
how this Xbox and PlayStation incorporation ends up, um shaking out. Yeah,
and whether or not the Google deal goes through. Of course,
all of you guys know possibly by the time this
podcast goes live, whether or not that happened, we are
still in the dark as of the recording, so I'm
really curious to see how it works out. Yeah. I
really think it's an exciting development. Thank you so much
(49:37):
Daniel for the question. Yeah. And and also I mean,
you know, for for everyone out there who uses Twitch
and is worried about the deal, uh, you know, I
understand it's it's scary whenever Google buys a property that
you are very fond of, especially giving Google's habit of
you know, saying huh, I don't know how to do
this anyway, and then shut it down. Yeah. Yeah, but
(49:59):
you know, I think that it could very much be
an excellent opportunity for many industries. So I think. Uh.
The other important thing to take away from this is
the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Twitch and being
turned down should give all of you Sony PlayStation four
owners a big sigh of relief. I mean, I can
only imagine if and Google has someone of a vested
(50:20):
interest in this. But Google doesn't have its own gaming
console out. You could argue that Android is a platform
for games, but it's just one platform. It's not the
main purpose for Android. Um. But you know, since they
don't have a vested interest necessarily, and whether Microsoft succeeds
over Sony, you don't have to worry about Twitch suddenly
(50:40):
losing support for something like the PlayStation four, which is
something I would legitimately worry about if Microsoft had bought Twitch,
I would really be curious to see how they would
resist that urge. So at least that that danger is
not on the table anymore. Daniel, thank you again for
your suggestion. If you would like to send us a
message like Daniel did, well, if you want to be
(51:02):
just like Daniel, you need to do the email thing
and our email addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com,
or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.
Our handle is tech stuff hs W. Hey, we got
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that as well, so check that out. Leave us a message,
let's know what you think, give us suggestions for topics,
and we will talk to you again really soon for
(51:27):
more on this and thousands of other topics because it
how staff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from half
stuff dot com either everyone, and welcome to text stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren. Before we get into this,
I just want to alert listeners ahead of time. I've
got a cold, so I'm going to sound a little weird.
(00:24):
He's kind of raspy. Is it's a little bit tom? Wait? Yeah,
you know the piano has been drinking and Jonathan has
been on an airplane. So that's where we're at. Today's
episode is brought to us courtesy of a little listener mail.
This one is from Daniel via actual email. Yeah, apparently
people still use that. By the way, guys, we've seen
(00:46):
a big upswing and listener and email and Facebook and Twitter.
We love it. Keep up the great so so much.
We're sending we We love every single note that we receive.
Even if we are too incredibly stressed out to respond
to all of you. We love you, Thank you so much.
I'm trying desperately to get through all the backlogs, so
if you have written, I am working my way back
to you, babe. Anyway, Daniel, he wrote to us to say,
(01:08):
I don't know if you did this before, but we've
recently had the news then online gaming streaming service called
Twitch is surpassing live streaming services like you Stream, w
w E Network live Stream, and other streaming services by volume. However,
I don't really hear about it outside of gamer groups,
which is odd to me. Can you all get into
the details about how Twitch works, or maybe into live
(01:30):
streaming in general. It's a growing trend in recent years.
I can only see getting bigger as gaming audiences grow.
You know what, Daniel, We agree it's a great topic.
It's one that's become incredibly important as of the week.
We're recording this podcast because they're Okay. So there's this
rumor going around, and at this point it's a very
strong rumor, although the parties that are involved are still
(01:52):
not commenting officially on it, that Google in the form
of YouTube is interested in purchasing Twitch for a billion dollars.
So this was a story broken by Variety originally, and
then it was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal, although
again no one from either Twitch nor Google is is
commenting on the subject. By the time this podcast comes out,
(02:14):
it may very well be that all of this is
supremely old news and that the the deal has either
been agreed upon or declined, but we don't as we're
recording this, don't know the outcome al right where we
are recording this on May twenty and um, and yeah,
these these two sources. By the way, Variety in the
Wall Street Journal reported different stories, um that the sale
(02:37):
is already certain, or that the talks are in early stages,
and that Twitch might just sell stake in their company
instead of selling the entire company as a whole. Right,
And even though official sources are not doing any talking
about it right now, anonymous sources have done a lot
of talking. For for example, Verage reported that other companies,
including Microsoft we're also according Twitch, but have been turned down. Um.
(02:59):
At any rate, It's it's a really interesting news item
for for both the gaming industry and the live streaming industry.
And I guess video on the internet as a whole, yeah,
And keeping in mind that video on the internet is
still a very young thing. I mean, it wasn't that
long ago that you didn't have any sort of video
hosting services. And the way you would get video on
the internet is that someone would save a video file
(03:22):
and you'd have to download the whole thing to watch it.
So this is a this is kind of showing the
next step in in the the world of video online.
So we've got the prerecorded stuff, which YouTube has got
pretty sewn up at least for user generated. Then you've
got the pre record stuff that is made by studios
and television networks. Now that's all over the place like Netflix, Hulu,
(03:44):
all that kind of stuff. And then you have broadcast
where you're doing a live streaming event, which is what
Twitch and other services like Twitch are all about. So
how does that work? Why is it such a big
deal of why why would Google even be interested in it?
A lettle in one billion dollars worth of interest in Yeah,
So we thought we would first go into a little
bit of history. We like to always look back into
(04:06):
how things became what they are. So let's, uh, let's
just think we're not going to get into the way
back machine because this is pretty recent history. Lauren and
I both lived through this history. It wasn't going on
immediately around us, but we were technically alive while it
was happening, yes, which is relatively rare for the two
of us. For lots of the history that we do
on this show. Yeah, there was a period in when
(04:26):
I was dead to the world. So anyway, Twitch is
kind of a first of all, it's a spinoff of
another company. It's so in order to understand where Twitch
came from, you have to go back a little further
and look at the origin of this other company, Justin
TV exactly who, which was founded by Justin Cohn, Emmett Sheer,
Michael Cybel, and Kyle Vauched. And so here's the thing.
(04:48):
Even that company was the product of some other some
other work done by this group of people that didn't
work out so much. You see, you had this group
who created a web calendar software called Keiko. This was
from a group who had gone to Yale together I think,
and formed the company soon after graduation. And so they
(05:11):
were approached by a brand new seed company called y Combinator.
And a seed company is all about finding startups to
to finance, to fund, hoping that those startups will blossom
and therefore those investments will end up making huge returns
in return. You also see these companies that otherwise might
(05:31):
not have a chance grow into something really interesting. Right.
Part of that same batch was both Reddit and Infogami,
which is one of those companies that was started by
Aaron Schwartz. Yeah, so amazing group of people, right, So
not just the smarty pants folks behind Kiko, but these
other groups as well. I mean, Reddit is now one
of the more popular sites on the Internet has a
(05:53):
flourishing community, although it's a community that has its own
uh issues and in fighting. Well yeah, I think the
more popular Reddit gets, the more irritated the hardcore audience.
But the same thing happened to dig so it'll be
interesting to see what happens with Reddit. But that's a
totally different podcast. So here's the thing about kiko um.
(06:14):
It was, according to Justin con himself, not that great
of a product, and the reason he gave behind that
was that he and his fellow programmers didn't really need
a calendar. He said, I was going to college, I
had two classes, I had classes on on two days
of the week, and otherwise I was sitting around programming.
So what the heck do I need a schedule for?
(06:36):
It does not useful to me. So since I didn't
need it, I wasn't using it, and since I don't
use it, the products we were making weren't very compelling.
And then Google calendar comes out and everyone's like, well,
so they decided what we're gonna do is we're gonna
sell this company for as much as we can so
that we can pay back our investors and then constrate
(06:56):
something else. So of course, they sold their company the
way any sane person would. They listed it on eBay,
and it's sold on eBay for some two and fifty
eight thousand dollars to a Canadian company called two Cows
to Cows. Two Cows. Yeah, yeah, they have two cows,
twice as many cows as someone who has one cow.
So yeah, except its spelled t u c ows, but yeah,
(07:20):
it's it's It was funny because they were going for
just fifty dollars. They wanted fifty grand. They were hoping
they could get fifty grand so they could pay off
their investors, and then they saw that it had hit
eighty grand and they thought, oh, we got some walk
in money now, and it finally sold for two eight
thousand dollars on eBay. All right, yeah, yeah, two two
cows and a calendar app that. Yeah, that's great. I
(07:42):
had no idea you could actually list a company on eBay,
and the idea that that's involved in the terms of
service blows my mind. Anyway, they successfully sell Keiko, and
in two thousand seven, Justin and Emmett pitched this idea
of justin dot TV to Paul Graham. Paul Graham was
the guy who founded the y Combinator Seed company, and
(08:05):
the premise originally was not for some sort of live
broadcast uh service for the general public, all right, It
was sort of a curiosity. The idea was to just
put a webcam um basically on on Kan's head and
have it broadcast twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week. So I think that he was doing so
it was justin TV, justin TV, right, it was. It
(08:26):
was like it was a kind of life casting, except
instead of having the camera turned back on himself, it
was more or less from his perspective and view. Yeah, yeah,
there's some great stories about weird things that happening. Within
the first week of going live, apparently his audience felt
that it was not the most compelling of of entertainment,
(08:47):
that watching a guy sit in an apartment and code
was not necessarily the most interesting subject matter, that it
needed a little bit of spice, so um, so they
provided it to the audience. Provided the spice this is
where you know, it's kind of like when you hear
about a news outlet making the news. In this case,
it was the audience making the contact content. How do
they make the content? They contact the police and say
(09:10):
that there was a report of a stabbing incident in
Justin Kahn's apartment. So the police pay a little visit.
By the way, this entire incident is preserved on YouTube
if you want to watch it. And so you hear
the cops knocking at the door, they come inside. They
explained that they got a report about stabbing. Pretty quickly,
(09:30):
Justin figures out, Hey, the it's our users who have
decided that this is this would be entertaining to watch.
What a bunch of scamps um. There were other incidents
that were similar, where they would call in fake fires
and there were like six or seven fire trucks lined
outside of Justin's apartment legally culpable scamps that. Yeah, So
(09:52):
eventually they decided, hey, you know this, Uh, this idea
isn't working because Justin's just not interesting enough off to
keep everyone's attention. Uh. There are other incidents as well.
There are plenty of videos online that explained the hijinks
these guys got up to But what happened was they
decided this isn't sustainable, it's not entertaining, So what can
(10:14):
we do. How can we modify what we've built into
something that actually resonates with people. So they revisit the
idea and they discussed different approaches, and they came up
with this idea of using the justin TV as a
platform for other people to broadcast things live over the Internet.
So this was the democratization of live broadcast. YouTube had
(10:37):
created the democratization of of sharing video. But but you didn't.
You couldn't do live events on YouTube at the time,
So what would where would you go if you wanted
to have like a live call in show, for example,
and you were using maybe Skype for people to call
in so that you could answer questions live on the air,
(10:58):
You didn't really have that option. But because people couldn't
hear you and then respond to you in real time,
twitch or not twitch. But justin TV was a chance
of doing that. So it's kind of interesting. They said
that the only reason they were able to do it
is because while they had been developing justin dot tv, uh,
they had advanced the technology to a point that brought
(11:18):
the cost of streaming video down significantly to just like
a couple of cents or a couple of fractions of
assent UH for a minute of video, which was important
because you know, depending upon how much bandwidth you were using,
your I s P might be charging you quite a
bit for it. Oh sure, but at that rate, with
a combination of advertising revenue from from ads and also
(11:42):
money from investors, they could kind of plug along, yeah exactly.
The ad supported videos helped them recapture some of the costs,
and they also got some pretty significant funding, like their
their first round UH netted them about two million dollars.
They would later get I think twenty million a couple
of years down the road. So they were getting money
from investors who said, this is the future of this
(12:06):
kind of internet delivery system. Plus they were thinking ahead
of how can we monetize this so that once once
we get past that investment period, how do we keep
making money? And that was through the ad support, So
they began to think, how can we really make it
easier for people to find the stuff they want? Because
as more people join, it gets crowded, right, and you're like, well,
(12:27):
there's a ton of people on here, but I'm only
interested in one specific topic. Uh. And so they started
to make categories and things like people who wanted to
talk about business, or people who wanted to talk about fashion,
or people wanted to talk about sports or video games,
and the video games category began to get incredibly popular,
something that mystified justin by the way you can watch
(12:50):
video interviews, and he said, I just didn't get it.
People were playing video games and streaming their video game
experience online and other people were watching it. What's up
with that? He just he was like, I didn't understand it,
but I realized that other people found it valuable, So
we knew that it was something we had to look at.
So they start thinking, well, you know, this makes a
(13:11):
lot of sense. We've we've got all these people who
are um watching stuff. We should try and take advantage
of that. So they ultimately on June six, two eleven,
launched twitch dot tv in public beta as a completely
separate brand. Now, this was the idea of let's take
that video game content that everyone is streaming and create
(13:34):
a product specifically for that, with tools built in to
help people do that more smoothly, so they don't have
to create their own system at home to make it work.
We're going to try and integrate it in as many
different approaches as possible so that more people can do this,
because it's clearly a runaway success story, and it made
much more sense to create a new brand than to
(13:55):
just nestle it under justin dot tv. In fact, Twitch
dot tv was getting bigger than just dot tv. Yeah,
they they basically immediately found an audience. They started with
some three point two million unique visitors per month. Yep. Yeah,
they they've increased that a little bit. Yes, about a
year later, they would hit twenty million unique visitors per month. Yeah,
(14:17):
and I think they're at forty five million currently, so
it is essentially doubled, like year over year, more than
doubled on that first one. So that was pretty impressive.
And you know, keep in mind that back in June
two th eleven, it was just in beta. It wasn't
even the full release yet. So they started having lots
of Like there's certain games that that definitely drove participation,
(14:39):
StarCraft too being a big one. Anything that you can
get big tournaments going for exactly. So, and you know
there are places like in South Korea where StarCraft tournaments are,
like the super Bowl is here in the United States,
so you get these enormous crowds live audiences watching these
well only here in the US. It just it never
really caught on that way, mostly because production costs or
(15:02):
something like that. If you wanted to televise it, we're
so high that you would have trouble getting the audience
large enough to justify that expense. But the overhead for
Twitch is way lower. I mean, you don't have as
many employees for one thing, the infrastructure is once you've
made the investment, much less expensive than television. So it
(15:26):
was sort of the perfect platform for that and it
really took off. It also allows the audience to talk
to each other during the event in a way that
the normal broadcast television obviously doesn't allow unless you invite
a lot of your friends over right, or you have
some app where you can watch the show and talk
with other fans. But we've seen this over and over
that television makes it. It's really hard to get something
(15:49):
like that to work from a television platform and poured
it over into an online interactive platform. Usually you see
people just use either Twitter or Facebook for that kind
of thing, right, And in eleven that wasn't so much
the case quite yet, No, no, you know, so this
in this case, you have a platform that by its
very nature allows for that kind of thing. However, as
(16:09):
of eleven it's still was not profitable and would not
become I think it technically has never been profitable for
a full year. They are estimating that as it will be, right,
But well, well we'll see. You have to get that
great balance of AD dollars and user base in order
(16:30):
to make it profitable. And of course the bigger it gets,
the more of an investment you have to make in
the company's infrastructure. Right. Of course, us a few things
that helped out greatly with that. Yeah. Yeah. For one thing,
you've got the fact that both Sony and Microsoft gave
Twitch a big thumbs up. Right, they announced partnerships that
(16:52):
would allow a native app on both of those gaming
platforms to integrate Twitch tv. Right. So, with the case
of of PlayStation four, there's a button on the controller
where you can start sharing what you're playing. It's a
little more complex with Xbox one. Uh. And in both
cases it was a feature that was not immediately implemented
as soon as the consoles came out, but was implemented
(17:13):
a little bit later on the life cycle of those consoles,
I say life cycle, and these things haven't even been
out a full year yet. Yeah, it's really interesting to
see that they were throwing their support behind this because
they could see both Sony and Microsoft could see that
this this was a trend that was growing, that people
were eager to share their experiences and more people were
(17:34):
eager to to eat it all up. So I mean,
I've watched play throughs online. Of course, the playthroughs I
watched tend to be done for for comedic purposes, where
it's a bunch of guys who are playing who know
each other really well, and they're really doing it as
a way of entertaining other people, Like that's the whole
purpose of it. They're not playing a game competitively against others,
(17:55):
which is what a lot of the Twitch TV stuffs for.
Not everything, but also you have you have streamed yourself
on Twitch, haven't you? I did. I did for twenty
five hours straight. I did a stream of me just
playing Minecraft. It was for the Extra Life charity, which
raises money for to buy video games and video game
(18:15):
systems for kids who are in hospitals and uh, so
I was part of this. It was kind of like
a Pledge Drive type thing. And for twenty five hours
I played and and streamed it live, and I always
had at least one or two people watching. Sometimes I
would have you know, a few dozen watching at a time.
UH And I even had a thing where for certain
(18:36):
levels of contributions, I would build uh monuments within Minecraft,
and the more money you made, the bigger and more
rare the monument would be, like the materials would be
more rare. So some people were incredibly generous and I
had to go and find the rarest materials and Minecraft
(18:56):
within twenty five hours and still build it. Like actually,
I was like, all, so for the first eighteen hours,
I'm just mining and then for the last seven hours
I'll be building. So yeah, it was actually a lot
of fun. But because of Twitch, I was able to
stream it live and people could check in on me
and see that I was actually doing this thing that
I had said I would do. UM And I also,
(19:17):
you know, I got to have an ongoing conversation with
folks through chat. He would chat to me and I
would answer that questions live while playing and and kind
of keep you motivated while you were doing this ridiculous marathon.
Sometime around our number nineteen or twenty, I definitely needed
some more motivation. Not to mention coffee. I think that's
the wall that they talked about in Marathon ng UM.
In September, Twitch sold an undisclosed stake in the company
(19:39):
to investors, raising that twenty million dollars that you mentioned earlier,
and a lot of that went to supporting their rollout
into the PS four and Xbox one. Yeah. Now, if
you're looking at today's numbers, according to Mercury News that
this was astounding. Twitch dot tv accounts forty percent of
all United States live streaming online. That's more than any
(20:01):
other live streaming site, including ESPN, NBC Sports and YouTube Live. Um.
This is all according to Quilt, which is a company
that helps networks manage bandwidth demand for video online and
announced that they had begun working with Twitch in April.
Twitch tv receives more than forty million unique visitors each month,
(20:21):
which I think we mentioned before. But yeah, that's a lot.
Like sure, if you look at YouTube, YouTube is getting
a billion, okay, but YouTube has Google behind it and
is adding a hundred hours of footage every minute, right,
This is this is considering that this is something that
was a spinoff of another company and has only been
(20:41):
around for for less than four full years, it's phenomenal. Yeah,
and its users spend an average of a hundred and
six minutes per day watching streams average. That is also insane.
That's so not to spoil it, but that's going to
come into play when we have our conversation of why
the heck would Google wants to spend a billion dollars
on the yes. To put all of this in perspective
(21:01):
a little bit, In February, a company called deep Field,
which does Internet data analysis for media companies like the
Wall Street Journal, Ransom numbers and reported that Twitch accounts
for one point eight percent of United States peak internet traffic,
which places it fourth overall after Netflix, which stands at
Google and Apple four point three. That also puts it
(21:24):
ahead of companies like Hulu, Facebook, and Valve, all of
which come in a couple tents of a percentage point lower.
That's pretty amazing. I mean, now, granted, these are all
different things, right because with Google, the fact that is
Google is pretty impressive considering that that's it's text based. Yeah, yeah,
it's not just uh, I mean, I guess Google that
(21:46):
probably also includes YouTube, so that's probably some video in
there too. But yeah, it's still impressive. The fact that
Valve is so far back is also impressive because you're
talking about like not just uh, online gaming, but that's
a gaming delivery service, you know, if people are buying
games on Steam. But um, yeah, still pretty impressive. Well,
we're gonna next tackle exactly how this whole system works,
(22:11):
but before we do that, let's take a quick break
to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back. Let's talk
about how this company actually delivers live streaming. That was
Daniel's question, how does it work? Now? A lot of
live streaming is using a very similar method, But first
it's good to say what it does not do, right,
because it's an intrinsically different system than for example, YouTube. Yeah,
(22:34):
so YouTube, you've got prerecorded user videos for the most part.
I mean, YouTube has some live stuff now, but the
bulk of its business is prerecorded video. So with that,
I would, for example, if I were uploading a video,
it would upload to YouTube, then it processes and it's
stored on YouTube servers actually usually multiple servers. Redundancy. Hey,
(22:56):
we said at the same time, we were being redundant.
So we're trying to it serve it up from a disk.
You know. That's YouTube actually pulls the video from some
saved part on some server or servers and serves it
up to you when you say I want to watch
this video now. That is completely different from the way
live streaming works. And one of the things that made
(23:18):
it possible was that, uh, this idea of peering networks.
So I'll get to that, but but also to explain
how peering networks are different, your basic uh server client
relationship is very centralized. You've got a server that has
all the information on it, and then you use a
client like a browser that then sends a query to
(23:40):
the server which says, oh, I know what you want,
you want this and sends it to you. Centralized right right,
And that means that if too many people are trying
to access that server at the same time, you're going
to run into a little bit of lags exactly, which
comes down on to your end because the server is
going to say, oh, hey, wait a minute, I'm doing
this other thing and this other thing, and and it
resolves and basically a load bar exactly. Yeah, the same
(24:03):
sort of thing. Like if Lauren had, uh, you know
she has she has cookies at her desk, and the
entire office comes to her at the same time to
get a cookie each It's gonna take a while because,
you know, it may be that she has a variety
of cookies and we each want a different type of cookies.
So Lauren, being Lauren, wants to be fair to everybody
and tries to make sure that this happens. But Lauren,
(24:25):
also being Lauren, gets overwhelmed with the fact that a
whole bunch of cookie hungry maniacs are approaching her and
wigs out. I mean, it just happens. So that would
be an issue of client server. So how can you
get around that. Well, if Lauren was able to clone
herself and every single version of Lauren had a box
of cookies, and all of the box of cookies had
identical types of cookies in them, like the whole variety,
(24:48):
we could all go to different Lauren's to get our cookies.
The interesting thing is that you know, they'd all have
exactly the cookie we would want. I want a cookie,
I like this bizarre university. Well that's the that's kind
of the nature of appearing. So the other issue here
is that if you have the prerecorded material, you can
do something called over subscribing bandwidth. Now, that just means
(25:10):
that you can serve more data than the network can
actually accommodate at any given time. So let's say that
I've got a five gigabyte limit on how much data
i can push out at any given time, but I've
got seven gigabytes of demand, all right. The way that
over subscription works is that I send out messages that
tell all the different clients that are trying to access
my stuff. Hey, I'm getting to you. Here's some of
(25:33):
the information. More of its coming right now, but just
just you know what, do a little song and dance
for the user. That's when you get the little buffer thing. Right.
So with YouTube, if a video is buffering mainly, that
just means that the service has a lot of traffic
and it's trying to serve all of that traffic at
the same time. So you're getting bits and bits of
data that are buffering slowly, so that once you hit
(25:56):
a certain threshold, you can push play and watch your
video and everything goes well, yeah, exactly. Hypothetically, exactly. Yeah,
if if, if it has buffered enough, you can push
play and you can watch the video all the way
through because at that point you're getting data faster than
the video is completing. Now, anyone who's ever seen video
buffer in the middle of a video know that that
(26:16):
knows that that doesn't always work, you know. Sometimes it's
just one of those things where the playback catches up
to the amount of data that's come in and you
have to wait longer. Okay, so how is how is
this peering structure different? Alright? So it's decentralized. So instead
of having that centralized server that all the different clients
are contacting, you have a system, a network architecture where
(26:40):
multiple servers are using copies of the same sort of thing,
and all of them can take on a part of
the work. So instead of one server where you you know,
you're just souping it up as fast as it can
go so it can work as best as it possibly can,
you distribute it across an entire network. Google actually does
this for their search, So for a Google Search query,
(27:02):
they have an entire network of servers that work together.
That's why if you ever do that Google search and
you look and it says it took point zero zero
zero zero zero eight three seconds to to answer this query.
That's why, because I've got this distributed network, So just
think of it as a group of people all taking
some of the load so that no one server is overworked. Now,
(27:26):
these servers can be located in different data centers, which
could be all the way across the world. They don't
have to be co located with anything or next to
each other. And because of this, you've got these individual
nodes which have this peering architecture that they're they're the peers,
so that each individual server is a peer in this
peering architecture, and they act as both suppliers and consumers
(27:49):
of resources. So each peer makes part of its computer
resources available to the other peers. This is that sharing,
that distribution of the load of any given computer request.
So this way you can get a bunch of you know,
average servers together and network them together and get a
better performance than if you just invest in that one
super fast server. It also makes it cheaper because you
(28:11):
can just get off the shelf parts to build your
servers instead of buying you know, the next ultra fast exactly.
So it and Again, this is also what allows you
to be have a lot of redundancy because you can
you can get a bunch of inexpensive parts as opposed to, well,
we blew all our money on this one really fast
machine that can't live up to our expectations. So what
(28:32):
happens I mean, because I'm sure that with the number
of people who are using this service, what happens if
demand exceeds even this capacity? Okay, so if there were
no overflow method, you would all get a buffering message
at the same time. Because all of these servers are
working together. It's this whole It's like it's an all
or nothing kind of situation. Now. Uh, the the peak
(28:55):
use of Twitch was something like ten times the amount
of the average use, which meant that they had to
build a network that could withstand ten times the normal
use at least, and in fact, you want to have
more than that to have a comfortable buffer. But even
if it goes beyond that. This is something they've learned
from their just in TV days, they wanted the ability
(29:17):
to have an overflow capacity where they use something called
a content delivery network or c d N. Now, this
is a specific type of business. It's a distributed system
of servers, so again sort of appeering network, but this
is kind of appeering network for higher So you would
use this if you wanted to create content and you
want to be able to distribute it to a wide
(29:39):
audience on a live basis. This is the sort of
approach you would want to take. And this is what
some companies like Netflix, they depend upon the sort of
networks to deliver the stuff that they make. Some companies
invest in their own, like twitch tv has its own network,
but again, if it exceeds that capacity, they can then
say tap the shoulder of the c d N and
(29:59):
say can you take over some of this stuff. Now,
for these cases, it does mean that the company, whether
it's twitched TV or some other media company, has to
pay for those services. You know, it's not a free thing,
but it does mean that there's at least a safety
net there. Should Let's say that that there's some huge
event that happens on twitch tv that really gets the
(30:21):
entire gaming world interested and they all want to watch
it at the same time live streaming, then they might
need to use that kind of resource because the demand
would exceed the capacity. They also developed a load balancing
software called Usher to help out a little bit in
in high demand situations like that, Yeah, this is really
(30:43):
really cool stuff. So Usher is kind of the the
the traffic manager. Right. Usher identifies what requests are and
how to fulfill those requests in what in other words,
how how many servers it needs to call upon in
order to handle the demand that's coming in. Right, So,
let's say that I'm going to stream the playing uh,
(31:04):
I don't know, some game, like I'm gonna go back
and play through some of the Halo games and I'm
gonna stream them live. Now, in that case, there's probably
not going to be a huge demand. There aren't that
many people who are that interested in watching a bald
guy fail miserably at playing Halo. Um until you try,
that's true. But I'm assuming that this would not be
(31:24):
one that Usher would be like ho Alert the media.
So Usher, when getting the message that I'm going to
stream this video and then analyzing how much of the
resources available we're going to be necessary for to deliver
upon that would contact various servers to make sure that
it was covered. And usually we're talking about a capacity
(31:45):
that exceeds what it expects for the demand. Now, if
it were some uh star Craft two champions that never
faced each other before, and they were going to have
a tournament style game against each other to determine who
is the true champion StarCraft Too. That could be huge,
and Usher would then make that determination and contact the
(32:05):
various servers that would all be copying the stream so
that they could share it up to UH to anyone
that would wanted to watch it. So then you've got
all these different factors that come into play that Usher
will take into considerations, So not just how popular are
the stream is going to be, but how much is
it gonna cost to serve up the live video? Because
(32:27):
like I said, bandwidth is not necessarily free. And Usher
can sit there and look and say which one of
these options is going to be the cheapest. Now, in
some cases, like with that StarCraft Too example, cheapest may
not be the best response because they want to make
sure that their customers, the viewers, are satisfied. So they
might say, all right, you know what, We're gonna incur
(32:48):
a cost on this, but what we want to do
is make sure we have the lowest latency possible so
that people who are watching are not experiencing like a
thirty second lag behind the action, so then sure can
prioritize on the fly. And it apparently the controls here
are incredibly precise so that you can tweak exactly which
(33:09):
things are the most important for any given situation. So
it's very versatile in that way, which I thought was
really really cool. Now every single server in that peer
network can actually act as two different things. It can
act as an edge server or it can act as
an origin server. So edge servers these are the machines
that are actually serving up the video streams that we're watching.
(33:30):
So if you log into twitch tv so that you
can watch someone else, you're getting that video feed from
an edge server. Now, the person who is making that
video is sending it to what is called an origin server.
That's the that's the machine that's accepting the incoming video,
so it can distribute it to the edge servers. And
because all the machines can do either role, it makes
it an incredibly flexible approach to delivering live video. And
(33:53):
that's why twitch dot tv works. If it had a
designated origin server and then designated servers, you would be
limited by that capacity. Now, if you could actually visualize
all these connections it would look very much like a tree.
So as people start to tune into a particular video stream,
you would have more and more branches forming off of
(34:15):
the trunk of that tree, so that those servers would
be able to deliver up the video most effectively to
those users. Because of course users aren't centralized either, right,
You could have users from all over the world tuning
in for any given video stream. So you want to
make sure that you can deliver the video stream the
best possible way to any individual user, uh, in the
(34:36):
way that it's going to make financial sense. So I mean,
that's why Usher, I thought, is so impressive because it
can take all that into account. Now, how is this
actually working on the back end? Like what's going on?
So with YouTube, you know you're saving two disk, but
with Twitch you aren't Twitch and justin TV do not
save video to a disk to serve it up. They
(34:59):
save the video stream within the server's memory. So the
video that's going to the origin server is saved and
its memory, it is making copies of that video stream
as it's being generated, sends those copies to the edge servers.
Those copies stay in the edge server's memory, which then
make a copy of that stream and send it to
(35:20):
the clients, the browsers that people are using to watch
the video stream. So it's copies and copies and copies.
Now that's not to say that they don't save this
information to disk. They do, but that's for archival purposes,
so you can go back and watch a video that's
been recorded previously. But it's not that that disk saving
things is what's coming into play here exactly while you're
(35:42):
watching it live. It has nothing to do with the
fact that it's also being saved to disk. That's that's
a completely separate thing that's going on. So when you're
watching your browser, your your client is sending in a
request via HTTP, so hypertext protocol good, all fun stuff.
(36:03):
We'll do an episode on it someday, I promise. But anyway,
it sends the HTTP request and Usher then accepts the
request because you know, he's a good guy. Uh, then
he decided I'm sorry, I'm thinking the software Usher decides
which server to connect you to, which edge server you
would be connected to, and then the video servers themselves,
they're they're very simple. They're just either acting as edge
(36:24):
or origin servers, so they're not making this determination at all.
That's all the usher software stuff, so and multiple data centers.
The data centers are actually located in proximity to major
peering exchanges on the Internet. Now, appearing exchange is not
the same thing as peer to peer networks. It's two
different concepts. Appearing exchange is a point on the Internet
(36:48):
where two major networks end up connecting to each other.
So remember the Internet is a network of networks, right,
So when you've got two big networks, like two big
Internet service provid witers for example, to have a connection point,
the purpose for that is to allow stuff that came
from one network to cross over and enter another network.
(37:10):
And these period exchanges their agreements essentially that say, hey,
as long as you let the stuff that comes from
my network travel across your network, all of the stuff
that comes from your network travel across my network, and
we're all even, Stephen. Now, this is one of the
points that net neutrality really makes important. They say, this
relationship is why we don't have to worry about any
(37:33):
particular part of the network holding the rest of the
Internet hostage by saying, if you want your traffic to
travel on my network, you're gonna have to pay me
x amount of money per x amount of data. That
would be bad. That would that would I mean it
would be bad. It would break the Internet the way
we have it today because you would make an uneven
(37:54):
playing ground, and if other networks followed suit, it would
just become this thing where you would have your the
the stuff you would have access to would be completely
dependent upon what originated on your network, who how much,
or who wasn't paying who? Yeah. Yeah, So that's anyway
again tangential. But the reason why the peering exchanges are
(38:15):
important is that by putting your data centers close to
peering exchanges, you have a much closer connection to individual networks.
Because this is kind of like the crossroads. If you're
able to plant yourself near the crossroads, you can connect
to all those different roads that split off from it
very easily. It's a very strategic move on the part
of Justin dot tv and Twitch dot tv. So really
(38:35):
the only thing left to talk about is the user experience.
You've got a browser, You've got a embettable player inside
that browser. That's what's handling the incoming video to play
it on your your screen. Same sort of thing is
like an inbettable YouTube player or blit TV, I mean,
any of those inbeatable players are doing the basic same thing.
That's just that's just the interface that allows you to
(38:58):
watch whatever the data is. So really there's not a
whole lot going on the client side. There's some load
balancing stuff that comes from the client side, but not
by not a whole lot. Most of it's on the
back end. Um and and same thing for the broadcaster.
There's not a whole lot going on that the broadcaster
has to manage. They basically just turn on their webcam
and to use the client and go. Yeah, you might
have to have a little extra software depending upon where
(39:20):
your video is coming from, like UH. For example, when
I needed to stream when I was playing Minecraft on
the PC UH and I needed to stream that online,
I had to download another piece of software that would
allow me to take the video from the game and
upload it to twitch Live. But there are lots of
different ways of doing that. And then when you've got
(39:40):
things like the Xbox one and the PS four, it's
incorporated directly into the consoles through the firmware, so that
one that's taken care of it for you. Right. This
ease of usability, I think is why it is in
fact so stink and popular. Um and and you know
there's that forty five million unique users per month that
we mentioned earlier is really is nothing to sneeze. No,
that's huge. And and and it's not just that there are
(40:02):
a lot of them. It's like the other thing you
pointed out, Lauren, it's there's a lot of them that
are watching a really long time. Yeah. They boast that
per week as a fall that was more viewers than
Breaking Bed, Tosh point O and the NFL preseason combined.
That's yeah, I mean that's a significant audience. And you know,
again they're really engaged. I mean, if I go to
(40:24):
YouTube and I'll watch a video, a lot of those
videos tend to be three to ten minutes long. You know,
there's some that are longer, and I'll watch those two
depending upon what I'm interested in. You go, maybe a
link along the side catches your eye and you watch
something else, but probably you're going to click away. Yeah,
you don't necessarily stay there for you know, more than
one or two videos. If you do, I mean, that's
cool too, but that's probably not the average person's experience.
(40:47):
You know, like a lot of people watch a YouTube
video when it's embedded in something else like a Facebook post.
The typical Twitch user, on the other hand, will stay
on the site for hours that that average of a
hundred and six minutes per day that we mentioned are earlier.
If that's an average, that means there are a lot
of people watching way longer than that. Oh right, yeah. Um,
And and the demographic that's going to twitch is a
(41:09):
really desirable one. The majority is under thirty five. I
think it's twenty one to twenty nine is the main,
main portion that that's the group of people that you say, hey,
these people buy stuff. Yeah, you've got lots of money
and you're probably willing to give it to me. Yeah,
so you aren't smart enough yet to know not to know.
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But yeah. And it's
(41:30):
also largely male, although there's a growing audience and broadcast
group of ladies as well. So we're starting to see
that that demographic is slowly changing. I mean, obviously gaming
has been very much male domin Yeah, but we're starting
to see a lot of females get into it because
they find gaming just as awesome of course, And and
(41:53):
as as the community changes and as the general standards
of the industry change, all of that is hopefully fingers
crossed going to change gender lines, right, So it's it's
again a growing market, So that's another reason why it's desirable.
But I mean that kind of engagement where you're going
to stay focused on something for on average a hundred
(42:14):
and six minutes. That is why Google is so interested
in in twitch dot tv. Not only is it lives,
not only have they done live streaming, and they've done
it well, they keep people there. Yeah. Yeah, as of now,
YouTube has really only been toying with live streaming. It
just opened their YouTube Live services up to the general
(42:37):
population in December and they haven't really done I mean,
it hasn't really seen that much traffic. Yeah. The only
other thing you can use is like the Google Hangouts,
where you can do a hangout broadcast and that ends
up broadcasting on YouTube as well, plus on Google Plus
and that kind of stuff. Um, and I've used that
a couple of times when I've been a guest on
other shows. Really I wasn't the one using it, they was.
(43:00):
I was participating in it. But yeah, it's still like
you said, it's a niche compared to someone like Twitch
dot tv that has just this huge audience. So what
would it mean if Google and Twitch joint forces to
rule the galaxy. Well, first of all, they might not
be able to. On a federal level, The Feds might
try to block this deal based on anti competition by saying, hey, Google,
(43:25):
you've already got YouTube, You've got you've got user generated
video sewn up pretty much. Yeah, you're the biggest content
player and you're trying to merge with the biggest content
streamer and that's really not okay. So that's a pity.
So that's a possibility. But if it goes through, it
would mean access to Twitch users to Google's incredible infrastructure,
um therefore improving the video quality and uh and lag
(43:47):
times that users are currently experiencing, which I mean Twitch
has said themselves that they were not prepared for the
kind of growth that they have seen and that it's
a fabulous problem to have. But yeah, it's still a problem.
It's still problem. So, like I said, Google has a
lot of experience with this kind of peering relationship, using
it for other things as well. So h So, in
(44:08):
at least on a philosophical level, it's from from architecture,
it's a good fit. I don't know how close twitches
architecture resembles that of Google on a practical level, but
philosophically they are very similar, right, and it's so it
could mean really good things there. It could hypothetically mean
more money for the people who are broadcasting. Twitch currently
(44:30):
has some four thousand partner casters who who are paid
for their casts. Yeah, when you get a certain number
of subscribers, you tend to get the attention of Twitch.
So let's say that you suddenly hits some new thousand subscribers,
which is going to say, hey, we should work together. Yeah,
this could be beneficial for everyone. Um, but Google could
(44:52):
possibly do even more for these content creators and if
nothing else, integrate more seamlessly with searching with YouTube, increasing
both ad revenue and audience participation. Alternately, it could mean
changes to the contracts of these professional live streamers, especially
considering YouTube's pretty strict policies about copyrighted material and on
(45:15):
region locking. Yeah. I mean a thing that a lot
of streamers do is they'll they'll have live music. Well
not live music. I don't think that they have a
band in their living right, but they have sometimes playing
in the background while they are playing a game, and
YouTube is not excited about that sort of thing. Well,
more importantly, the music in this reason not I'm not
excited about that. They don't necessarily want their music associated
(45:36):
with There's also some control issues, like Nintendo historically has
been very very protective of their of their video games,
and people who have put up, uh YouTube videos of
them playing the Nintendo games, a lot of them have
experienced takedown because Nintendo said, you know what, we want
(45:56):
to have full control of this experience. We don't like
the idea of other people being able to do that.
Nintendo started to ease up a little bit on that
more recently, but it's traditionally been an issue, and so
there's no guarantee that every single game publisher is going
to be totally cool. That's a whole that's a whole
other issue that I really wish that Nintendo would get with.
(46:19):
But back back on on the Google deal side, it
could hypothetically get other demographics than just gamers into this
live internet streaming kind of stick. Yeah, it's kind of
the whole purpose of justin dot tv in the first place.
But Twitch dot tv was the one that took that
was the part that took off off of justin dot tv.
And now now that people are getting more familiar or
(46:41):
aware of this, and also now that Twitch has grown
it into a very usable process, yeah, that we might
see more people get into this kind of live broadcast platform. Yeah,
for for events large and small, for for entertainment, maybe
for for science kind of discovery broadcasts, for news. I've
seen a couple of podcasts use this sort of thing
(47:04):
as to live stream when they were actually recording, so
you could follow along. Now, before any of you ask,
that's not gonna happen with us. I think in this
in this recording alone, we've stopped to cough about nineteen times.
I in fact, had to stop to cough before I
recorded this line. She actually started the line, stopped coughed. Yeah, no,
(47:25):
no one, no one wants that we both have congestion issues.
So yeah, if you guys were watching live right now,
it would be cough cough cough cough cough, three paragraphs
worth of information cough cough cough. Yeah, that that how
it works. Section took us forever because of me, So yeah,
we will not be doing that. And even when we're
feeling well, still not doing it so, but but at
(47:47):
any rate, I mean, you know this, this could this
could hypothetically change television as we know it. This could
be the bridge between network broadcasts and internet viewing. Yeah,
we could actually see very re regionalized approaches to stuff
as well as you know, more global appeal kind of broadcasts.
I've seen some communities do kind of a local news
(48:10):
broadcast for that community. This sort of thing would allow.
It's kind of like the public access in that sense,
and that it's a live way to communicate information out
whether it's entertainment or educational or news or whatever. You
can do that on a specific schedule. The other advantageos,
of course, it does record the videos, so even if
(48:31):
you aren't able to tune in live, you can still
watch it, which gives an advantage over other types of
live broadcasts. Sure, and it's it's on demand all the time.
It's on the internet. Anyone in the world hypothetically can
tune into this. Yeah. So let's say that you move
away from your hometown, but you want to keep tabs
on it. That could potentially be a way of that happening.
Or if one performer becomes very popular and and explodes
(48:54):
across you know, into other communities. That's wonderful. We're still
waiting make us explode people, you know, in popularity that is, yes, please,
thank you. Most of my atoms where they are. Yeah,
I'm pretty fond of where my my constituent atoms happen
to be as well. So anyway, that's that's the lowdown
on Twitch dot tv. It'll be really interesting to see
(49:16):
how this Xbox and PlayStation incorporation ends up, um shaking out. Yeah,
and whether or not the Google deal goes through. Of course,
all of you guys know possibly by the time this
podcast goes live, whether or not that happened, we are
still in the dark as of the recording, so I'm
really curious to see how it works out. Yeah. I
really think it's an exciting development. Thank you so much
(49:37):
Daniel for the question. Yeah. And and also I mean,
you know, for for everyone out there who uses Twitch
and is worried about the deal, uh, you know, I
understand it's it's scary whenever Google buys a property that
you are very fond of, especially giving Google's habit of
you know, saying huh, I don't know how to do
this anyway, and then shut it down. Yeah. Yeah, but
(49:59):
you know, I think that it could very much be
an excellent opportunity for many industries. So I think. Uh.
The other important thing to take away from this is
the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Twitch and being
turned down should give all of you Sony PlayStation four
owners a big sigh of relief. I mean, I can
only imagine if and Google has someone of a vested
(50:20):
interest in this. But Google doesn't have its own gaming
console out. You could argue that Android is a platform
for games, but it's just one platform. It's not the
main purpose for Android. Um. But you know, since they
don't have a vested interest necessarily, and whether Microsoft succeeds
over Sony, you don't have to worry about Twitch suddenly
(50:40):
losing support for something like the PlayStation four, which is
something I would legitimately worry about if Microsoft had bought Twitch,
I would really be curious to see how they would
resist that urge. So at least that that danger is
not on the table anymore. Daniel, thank you again for
your suggestion. If you would like to send us a
message like Daniel did, well, if you want to be
(51:02):
just like Daniel, you need to do the email thing
and our email addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com,
or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.
Our handle is tech stuff hs W. Hey, we got
a tumbler too, which is awesome. Text Stuff HSW for
that as well, so check that out. Leave us a message,
let's know what you think, give us suggestions for topics,
and we will talk to you again really soon for
(51:27):
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