Chapter 1
The Platform

A brief history of Twitch

Twitch began life as ‘Justin.tv’, a website set up by three young American men with the primary goal of broadcasting, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, the life of one of their members: a certain Justin Kan. For eight months in 2007 Kan wore a baseball cap with an attached webcam. Viewers saw and heard almost everything that Kan was doing, yielding a strikingly intimate portrayal of his life at the time. While many viewers enjoyed this rather odd and unusual insight into a stranger’s life (known by the term ‘lifecasting’), others saw it as an opportunity for ‘messing with’ or harassing the caster. Kan was subject to ‘swatting’ – reporting someone to the police as a potentially dangerous criminal in order to elicit an armed response team to intervene on a live stream (Taylor, 2018: 222; Uttarapong et al., 2021: 16; Jacob & Tran, 2023) – on numerous occasions (Cook, 2014) and others found equally inventive but less potentially fatal ways to mess with the life of someone broadcasting everything he was doing. Even at this early stage in the history of live streaming there were viewers who were on board with the streamer and the stream’s objectives, and viewers who sought to disrupt it – attitudes anticipating much of what evolved on Twitch over coming decades. The appeal of these streams thus introduces some of the key themes this book explores: the intimacy of the live stream (Senft, 2008; Dargonaki, 2018; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019; Phelps et al., 2021b), the sense that one is watching the life of a friend instead of the distant life of a celebrity, and the potential for viewers to both engage with – and mess with, potentially seriously – its broadcasters.

Over the following years the site grew in popularity and in the variety of its channels. In 2011 Justin.tv launched a gaming-specific section called Twitch.tv, or just Twitch (Rao, 2011). This reflected how successful gaming content had become at that point, having eclipsed the site’s original lifecasting focus. Twitch enabled anyone with the appropriate technology, internet speed, and ability to figure out then-opaque live-streaming software packages, to broadcast their gaming. At this time there was a now little-remembered competitor to Justin/Twitch known as ‘Own3d.tv’ – ‘owned’ being a term in gaming denoting resounding victory over one’s opponent(s) in a game – which was hosting solely gaming content, but by the end of 2013 Own3d had shut down, leaving Twitch as the only site of any size focused on game live streaming (Peel, 2013). Twitch at this point was far from the size it would later reach, but the fact that the gaming component of live streaming had come to dominate the rest of the site – which allowed for the streaming of essentially any non-adult content – was telling. In early 2014 Justin.tv Inc. changed its name to Twitch Interactive (Popper, 2014) and later in 2014 Justin.tv stopped broadcasting, explaining that resources had to be focused entirely on Twitch. Only weeks after this it was widely reported that Amazon had purchased Twitch for a fraction under US$1 billion (Wingfield, 2014).

Twitch continued to expand and evolve under Amazon’s aegis. One of the most important aspects of this was the addition in 2016 of the on-site currency ‘Bits’, through which one can ‘Cheer’ for streamers and give them the money that the Bits represent. Twitch donations had previously gone through PayPal and moving to Bits enabled Twitch to keep a greater portion of revenue circulating within the site rather than going to a third party (Partin, 2020). Around the same time Twitch also introduced the ‘Twitch Prime’ membership for those with an Amazon account (Ask et al., 2019; Cai et al., 2021a); this essentially allowed for a free subscription to a streamer of the viewer’s choice using their Amazon account. Between 2019 and 2022 Twitch also introduced exclusivity agreements. This meant that someone who signed up to stream on Twitch was – if contractually ‘partnered’ (Twitch enabling the streamer to earn income through the site) – only allowed to broadcast on Twitch (Parrish, 2022). One of the last major developments in this period saw Twitch reduce the revenue share given to some of the most successful streamers. There is no doubt that running a live-streaming platform is much more financially demanding in server time and capacity than a non-video-based website with an equivalent userbase, but this shift also shows Twitch focusing increasingly on maximizing income. The site’s profitability – which remains surprisingly opaque, although the consensus seems to be that Twitch does not generally turn a profit (Bussey, 2020; Grayson, 2023; Tassi, 2023) – drive much of its public decision making, and are often used to justify firing staff to reduce costs. Nevertheless the resentment that many smaller streamers and even viewers felt – to the fact that the largest streamers earning over $100,000 a year would now earn slightly less – is revealing. This solidarity towards high earners tells us something about the sense of personal connection that viewers can feel towards streamers, which we return to throughout this book.

A decade and a half has seen Twitch utterly transformed. Beginning as a niche (though later quite well-known) site for the lifecasting of a single person and later a small group of people, it has now become one of the fifty or so most-visited websites on the planet, valued in the billions of dollars, and a central force in digital gaming culture. Unsurprisingly the interface and possibilities of the platform have also expanded since then, with a constant stream of new features reshaping the site. What, therefore, is Twitch now like to use in the mid-2020s, after its transformation from a platform for a handful of lifecasters to, instead, a thriving hub for over a hundred million gamers?

The Twitch interface

Most people moving onto Twitch for the first time will be presented with the Twitch homepage. A selected channel will start playing. Underneath this lead stream the site offers numerous sets of possible streams in different categories, and the further one scrolls the greater the range of possibilities. If not enticed by the largest streams at the top of the homepage, the user perhaps scrolls down and sees a category that interests them – or something unknown which intrigues them – and gains some initial sense of the size of the platform and variety of content. Twitch’s initial ‘pitch’ to the new viewer is therefore focused on streamers and their audiovisual content, rather than on joining communities or having viewer-to-streamer interactions.

Clicking on any of these channels takes the user to that streamer’s channel, taking the form Twitch.tv/[username]. The selected channel now expands to take up most of the screen. This is the main video of the live stream in which one watches the streamer doing whatever they might be doing. Joining a channel for the first time, one inevitably jumps in part way through a broadcast. Sometimes stream content can be easy to pick up but in other cases – especially if a streamer is taking a break, or doing something slightly out of the ordinary, or responding to their viewers – one joins a channel in a lull, with seconds or even minutes passing before ‘normal’ content on the stream resumes. Viewers sometimes make jokes about these interstitial moments as a way to pass the time and interact with each other while waiting for a streamer’s return. When joining a stream, the Twitch chat window also loads. If the channel is highly active messages will begin appearing immediately; if the channel is less active the chat window sometimes appears empty for some time until a first (from your perspective) message appears; and if the channel has few if any viewers the chat window might remain empty indefinitely. The chat window turns the channel from something one might just watch without any social engagement into a ‘digitised spac[e] for sociality and communication’ (Chesher, 2024: 36). Without a username the new user cannot comment in Twitch chat but is allowed to read it; signing up to the site allows the new user to begin chatting immediately.

Once a viewer has found a channel they want to watch, they have options. The simplest is to watch and listen to the broadcast. Streams might last only a few seconds or minutes – though streams of this sort often indicate a technical issue or some kind of humorous or light-hearted statement on the part of the streamer – but usually last much longer. It is hard to state an average length of broadcast as the variation is immense across people and communities and types of channels, but the hundreds of streams I have observed in the last almost-decade of researching Twitch have generally come in around three to five hours. Streamers seem to tend towards a stream length that is long enough for viewers to really settle into the channel and for the broadcaster to play a substantial amount of the game they’re focusing on (or do a significant amount of the activity they’re doing), but also not so long that the streamer gets burnt out or needs to take a break. Regardless of the length of broadcast, however, the viewer can dip in and out – there is no obligation to...