Someone explain Twitch to me

People who buy lotto tickets because it’s fun, sure. Those people who keep planning out what they’re going to do with all that money while spending half their disposable income on lotto tickets… That’s sad. :/

Apparently Lollapalooza (big Chicago music festival) is being streamed on twitch

Uh, OMG…

That’s an interesting video. It also helps inform my grumpy feelings when pondering Amazon’s recent change to Twitch prime such that it’s no longer ad free. Now I am getting a fair number of advertisements (it’s worth considering if it is worth it to change channel now) because Amazon was worried streamer’s were being denied ad revenue.

Very interesting, thanks.

I was a bit surprised when he said $10k per hour to play a “dogshit” game wasn’t worth it to him because it would be mind-numbing. I would think the real reason to pass on something like that is because it might turn off your viewers if you play a terrible game.

So the serious question is what is the mojo this guy has? How is he able to convince people to give him money? what disposable income vein is he striking?

Just ‘winner takes all’ economics. Popular streamers attract more viewers because they are already popular. I don’t think he’s more ‘mojo’ than many people doing streaming - he’s just the one that got the lucky break.

This. And then it becomes a pseudo celebrity situation that someone can pay a few dollars to in order to get immediate public recognition from them.

He’s a Hearthstone streamer. I play a lot of Hearthstone and watch him from time to time. He has a dry humor I like.

I don’t pay for anything on Twitch though. I guess I contribute to the ad revenue, but that’s it. Honestly I’d rather watch twitch than tv. The past year I’ve been watching twitch instead of sports.

A video hasn’t cracked me up this much in a while.

Ad revenue is basically nothing. Most decent sized streamers never run ads. I remember one of them saying they could run ads for 25 minutes straight with 1.5k people in the channel and get like $1-2 or something.

Yeah. I am getting the sense that Amazon’s excuse is pretty weak. I am really getting irritated by the change to Amazon Twitch Prime. I tend to channel surf for games I am interested in rather than sit in one channel to watch the streamer. Currently that pattern has me watching ads really often as the check seems to be at channel load.

Yeah, loading a stream always ran an ad, even if the streamer wasn’t running ads most of the time.
Amazon Prime removed that and was probably the best feature of Twitch Prime.

I’m confused, did they make the switch to ads for everyone already? I haven’t seen any yet. Does AdBlock work on them?

It sounds like uBlock Origin does (at least, sometimes or on some ads) - and if you’re not using uBlock Origin, it is the current top tier adblocker extension.

I also saw recommendations to use a third party desktop application based on VLC, called Streamlink.

I’ve been using VLC + Streamlink. Streamlink captures the stream, then redirects it to any media player that can play streams (VLC being one of that is cross platform.). You don’t get adds, and it uses far less CPU. You can also run the stream in a nice window.

I typically run a stream on the second monitor when I’m playing slower games, it works pretty well.

If you have an annual subscription to Amazon Prime, the ads will start showing up when the subscription renews.

So you have to pay for the privilege of viewing ads?

No. You pay for free goods delivery. As a bonus, you get Amazon Prime Video, Music, free Twitch games every month and the ability to donate a free Amazon Twitch Prime subscription to the streamer of your choice (which can benefit some Qt3ers).

The fact that ads are showing again is hardly paying for ads…

Great post!! thanks!