Influence of Twitch streams on users

When talking about streaming, we have to think of the popular live streaming video platform Twitch. Twitch was first introduced in June 2011 and currently has 15 million daily active users. But what do all these people watch?

The main thing being streamed are video games. In fact, the most popular thing at the moment right now is the well known Fortnite Battle Royale. The top streamer of the game at the moment is Tyler Blevins, or better known as Ninja.

Blevins has broken the record for most concurrent viewers with 667,000 viewers. The former record was 600,000, also by Blevins. The twitch streamer was formerly known for being a professional esports player for Halo 3, H1Z1 and Player Unknown Battlegrounds, but has since exploded streaming Fortnite.

In the week of May 21, Ninja had a combined 5.3 millions hours watched by viewers, 4.2 million ahead of the second most watched streamer of that same week. He is also known for streaming with rappers Drake and Travis Scott, as well as current Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Juju Smith-Schuster (that is how he first broke the Twitch record for most concurrent viewers).

Ninja is much more than just some guy who plays video games. On February 6, he accumulated over $100,000 for suicide prevention and is known for donating the money given to him by his viewers to other charities.

Other things that are watched other than video games are irl streams where the streamer normally interacts with their chat. A previous twitch streamer by the name Ice Poseidon was in fact one of them, but he shows how Twitch is not yet perfect.

Back in April 2017, he would be continuously banned for the actions of his viewers. His viewers, as pranks, would normally call in to local police stating that he is a terrorist, one of which happened was called in as a bomb threat which lead to a full scale search of the aircraft. He was permanently banned because he told his chat of his location, but it shows the failure of Twitch to address the viewers of Ice Poseidon’s content.

Streaming services are not perfect. Even with problems, Twitch allows people to stream their content to the internet and has allowed people like Ninja to entertain thousands of viewers and spend their money on a just cause.