Live content is just inherently harder to consume. Specially when you're working a job.

Yeah a group of engineers and I worked on an MVP for a new live-streaming platform. The three of us got everything working with a nice UI and some decent chat features; but even the with the small sample size of streamers we had testing the platform, we quickly realized how ridiculously expensive running a streaming platform actually is. It’s really hard for a new company to even consider jumping into this space. A lot of work would need to go into a new highly efficient compression algorithm or something to make it cost viable outside of owning your own ad network or some other way to collect heavy consistent revenue

People don’t care about streams on Twitch, they care about the UKposts video.

Gonna be honest, I always thought streaming was stupid. It's like, "you know all of those cool things you see on live stream clips on UKposts? If you watch me for 3 hours, you might see one of those 2-15 minute clips!" My time is more precious than that. I'll wait for the good stuff to be clipped for me.

I haven't monetised but I'm streaming 3 hours a day to 10 or so people. I'm just bleeding twitch of money 😅

UKposts videos >> Twitch streams everyday of the week for me! I know before hand how much time i will have to invest to watch the content and i know the topic of the video.. no way i would sub on Twitch and look a 2h stream where the topics are unknown and the content isnt probably compressed enough! The bad side is i dont have a direct line with you but i feel i still am in touch with you watching your videos.. not sure i would have something interesting to say to you based on the topic you cover.. im more like focused on really learning from you and im achieving that already on YT 😊 hope it makes sense! Thx a lot sensei for your insights on these topics 😊

next video: i fixed twitch

Most of the people I know who watch stream admit that they mostly use it as background noise. Streams simply aren't all that interesting a lot of the time. If you consider edited game streams, they usually compress anywhere from 10-20 hours into a 20-30 minute video, and even then it's not like the entire video is all that entertaining either.

I have been watching UKposts everyday for longer than i can remember and one very important feature for me is to set the playback speed. I usually watch everything at x2 speed to learn as much stuff in as little time as possible. I don't think that's possible with live streaming

The great thing about UKposts and similar platforms is that you decide when to watch whatever video you want. It's like async TV.

great video theo... filleted perfectly about the current state of streaming and what options we(as users of the platform be it consumer/producer) have

UKposts please fix your chat 😢

A lot of comments about 'why watch 2hr of content when you can see good clips on YT after the fact' - thats why it blew up during the pandemic. People wanted to have that deep connection with someone, live just meant it didn't feel like such a parasocial relationship because the creator could respond immediately.

There is a small chance that eventually we could get to a point where video encoding could cut costs low enough. I believe AV1 encoding (which twitch happily still doesn't support) is a good example of. I could see discord type live streaming working well for the smaller community streams.

Dude, you’re amazingly insightful. Your content is awesome because you have first hand experience.

I just realized, Every Streamer I watch on Twitch, I found via UKposts first.

Hey! @theo rants I have a question for you. Would the cost reduce within a reasonable amount if a streaming platform started picking up AV1 encode/ decode & reduce the max bitrate by a lot? Maybe I'm missing something else but the bitrate reduction should lower the cost aswell? And what about increasing the delay again. Back in 2015 ish we had a delay of 15 ish seconds with the chat. I believe it costs way more to get such effective servers to provide video with such fast times. Could a platform with AV1 / lower bitrate limits/ higher delay servers be profitable?

I'm curious, what would you estimate twitch's cost to serve 1 billion watch hours at the estimated ~3 Mbps I assume twitch averages and 2.3 billion messages? That chat message data rate is a little hard to estimate but I used an average message length of 100B with a replication rate of 3000 which means the average chat message was 100 characters long and was seen 3000 times. My estimate was in the neighborhood of ~$100 million. That comes out to the equivalent of ~$9-10/GB of data delivered at an average latency of what I would assume is ~4s. I don't feel that's in the wrong ball park. Or maybe I'm delusional and the electricity + hardware + maintenance costs really are that high at AWS. I looked around and that seemed reasonable. All told that comes out to about $2.2 billion in delivery costs in 2022. Now to be fair that's an absurd amount for the amount of users on that platform daily, but is my estimated figure way off? Unless there's stupid high overhead at twitch, twitch should have just barely broken even in 2022 given staffing costs for their apparent $2.8 billion revenue figure. Without aggressive ads they would 100% be way under bleeding money hard. Are my estimates way off or what are some costs I'm ignoring here?

Is it possible that they're banking on streaming costs going down long term? I don't know how viable a UKposts type video streaming would have been a while ago. Or are we only going to see marginal savings from hardware improvements?

I’d be interested to know how Floatplane compares

What do u think about live podcasts, audio only?

What about P2P Video Streaming? Wouldn't that help with the cost? IP of the users would leak but is that too much of a concern?

Theo on Floatplane?? Ask Luke!!

“Commend anyone trying to create it.“ I’m looking at you Floatplane

I’m usually on Rumble for sports, UKposts for news and Content Craters. I’m still on Twitch but I only follow two people.

New camera?) The image looks awesome!

So far, no streamer was creative or interesting enough to make me watch his stream for hours. I usually watch only the distilled good stuff on UKposts. The most time, I've spent on Twitch was, when Twitch plays Pokemon started. So to me, it is a good platform, when user interaction is necessary for the stream, which is more than streamers reading the chat from time to time or reading some messages out loud. It is also great, when live really matters. For example in tournaments, where people want to know the newest state of the game as soon as possible. In other scenarios, I also see Twitch dying.

2:44 "not the other way around" thats pretty accurate!

I never understood why Amazon didn’t integrate far deeper into Twitch as they could. They have a deep ad platform there and twitch streamers have shown to be great Merch pushers. Would be a way to rack up ad money and Econ fees as long as you don’t degrade the watch experience too much. Instead, I would see 3 pre-video ads and just closed the app

I'm the process of moving all my old Twitch VODs over to UKposts, I can't stand the dumpster fire that Twitch has become. I started there in 2015! Not allowing content creators to simulcast is a recipe for disaster!

I wonder if you could make an inverted pyramid scheme webrtc thing where one viewer serves videos to two other viewers, it'd be a total nightmare in terms of connection reliability though.

I wonder if p2p streaming technology is mature enough to provide similar experience while lowering the cost significantly.

Maybe I'm too FOSS-pilled, but it seems to me that a possible way forward is to break up the services Twitch provides and, notably, have some of the compute those services consume be either paywalled or not part of the platform/main product outright - allowing users to run those parts themselves if they choose to. For example, how much of XQC's supposedly million-dollar-per-month cost to Twitch is from just re-encoding his stream to the different qualities Twitch provides? And would it not be possible for Twitch to charge extra for that re-encoding, while offering endpoints for XQC (or whichever streamer would be interested) to upload their own pre/re-encodings if they have the capability to do so? I know that currently re-encoding is only available to streamers that get "big" enough, but this seems like an alternative that not only might be more financially manageable, but also would further empower creators instead of impede them. Pushing this type of reasoning further, maybe what would give Twitch the most resilience is to *degrade* it's primary offer to simply be that of a stream aggregator and/or viewer/stream P2P matchmaker. And have video re-encoding, as well as CDN for streams, be separate (paid) services in their ecosystem. Of course, they would have to invest more directly into OBS and/or other streaming tools to make sure people can onboard just as easily, or else most of their traffic would dry up pretty quickly. I do think this is the best way to ensure longevity for both the platform and the medium of human expression that is online streaming - and Twitch can even take advantage of this to offer more discrete places where ads can be inserted in exchange for streamer revenue if they want!

"charge the viewers right?!" -- lmaooooo if only it were that simple! people get sooo mad when they are given a 15-30 sec ad that supports the creator for FREE on the viewers behalf.. the monetization culture basically anywhere that isn't twitch is essentially non-existent! Memberships on YT are there, but I'm sure the ratio of members to subscribers for every channel is extremely low!

I can't remember a time when twitch was run well

It is clear that Twitch may not have fully considered the consequences of their new policies. While they may have anticipated a significant increase in revenue, the outcome has been quite different. Instead of boosting their profits, these policies have had a detrimental effect on streaming on their platform, and potentially on others as well.

do you think youtube is profitable? my guess is that youtube is still in phase of spending on a platform that might be profitable in the future, when youtube will turn the ball to make profit - you will also see 50/50 ppl don't realize the cost of infra

Didn’t even have twitch before I found Primeagen

UKposts Live is still the best we can get.. I install and uninstall the twitch app many times and while working Twitch is just a distraction..

as a creator why do you care about stake owning kick, and the ad situation of rumble or kick , you get a fair revenue split and freedom

i love twitch and its pool content

Why watch twitch when i can watch at my own pace on UKposts

streaming is like the tv... tv is dead because no one want to sit behind a screen at a fix time for X hours

Twitch has always been a shitty platform I’ve never been able to understand why people even use it.

Discord tho

They just need to focus on a great hooli chat

here is an idea: you make a vtuber only Livestream platform, you're not sending the video just the audio and some tracking data that is rendered in browser 😂 that should be cheaper right? and we can all be anime girls😂

personally i think self hosted or peer to peer platforms / fediverse are teh way forward, take owncast or peertube as an example, teh challenge that might need to be solved is making it easier for people to find teh content they want across all these different services and offerings, but that sounds like a task an ai powered search could solve

9:10 how we know that this video was edited by Theo :)

You can't complain about twitch not providing enough value for their split while at the same time saying that the competition is not up to the standard. Streaming is just too expensive.

What about Floatplane? Luke has said that the platform is profitable, and the costs don't seem that high at all.

I went to Twitch because of ThePrimagen and because UKposts chat is so fucking delayed.

What about LTT's floatplane?

I do hope Twitch figures it out but yeah it's not looking good.

Why not just use a federated solution Peertube and have the cost be put back on the streamer and have the audience pay for the stream?

I don’t even know why you’re streaming. Yeah, it’s good to milk the most out of your audience wherever they are, but just pump out more UKposts videos.

Back to work, back to school, back to office. Hard to watch live content when youre back to the bustle.

TikTok live less go? 😅

Good. I've never understood the appeal of Twitch, people watching mostly gamers for 8 hours straight, and paying them hard earned money for brief acknowledgement. It's the ultimate parasocial relationship. Recently Diablo 4 came out, and I wanted to tune in to see what some of the top players thought and if it was worth buying. Then to find out there is a top player, who has a kid and a wife, had been streaming for 23 hours straight chasing a world first. That shit's just fucking sad. Not to mention all the flexing going on. Streamers suing each other over petty drama, and other streamers not involved in said drama offering to pay the legal fees. Not to mention the net contribution over all is mass procrastination. For every 1 streamer making a living, there's 10k-100k viewers every day wasting hours on end watching someone else, instead of doing something with their lives. How many more people does that inspire to start streaming, that end up wasting more time not getting anywhere. That's not to say I don't think people should be allowed to stream, or watch streamers ... but I'll be interested to see what our production rate looks like in 10 years when essential workers/trades end up retiring and have no one to fill the jobs because everyone just wants to be an influencer or a Twitch streamer.

YT live is better anyway. Video quality is way better on a phone connection.

Time to think about how AI can reduce streaming costs. The thing is... you need to hire a ton of developers again to get it done. 😂

hi

yes i yse twitch because of you

Why not build a Twitch replacement?

@theorants I agree with a lot of what you’ve said but you should maybe look at what floatplane is doing by Linus tech tips. They seem to be doing amazing stuff and have much higher bit rate than any other platform

Twitch have become what all monopolized companies become at their peak; greedy. And they better be careful because there are other competitors who have their own fully working, high quality streaming service.

can't have anything nice under capitalism 😔

Overpaying content creators hurts them too I bet

You and Tpain 😂

Rumble is doing it right. They've built out their own datacenters and are running on their own hardware. Doing something like this in the cloud just isn't feasible unless you own that cloud platform.

Twitch died because it got too popular.

Live content is not going anywhere, live streams of kick, instagram, rumble, UKposts, and Tik tok are blowing up and doing good.

Twitch needs an "Elon-Treatment"

More layoffs today.

Step one: Stop banning people for stupid reasons.

Nope wrong

Im thinking about coverting to Muslimism...i dont like all the weird stuff this world is starting to get into. we need to go back to men being men

Twitch sucks, Kick streaming for the win

So he doesn't like twitch but I's scared to leave or he wont/can't make money. Or/and is afraid yo start over on another platform 🥱🥱