Amazon, Twitch and the Future of Live Streaming

Live-streaming has changed quite a bit over the years to become one of the top forms of online entertainment. Companies like Twitch, YouTube, Vimeo and others are taking advantage of the new trends in live-streaming by using video, video games, live production and others to attract an audience. The video game industry alone was a $138 billion market in 2018 and clearly there’s one live-streaming platform that’s dominating the competition, Twitch.

Each year the Super Bowl has 50 to 100 million views online & on tv. Twitch reaches this number in most tournaments. They have hundreds of millions of users and are global. Tournaments are highly viewed and are only going up.

History behind Twitch LiveStreaming

Twitch had the sixth highest traffic for streaming video in the world, in 2018, and in January of 2019 had nearly 1 billion hours of streams watched on the site.

Before Twitch took the Internet by storm, the site went by a different name, Justin TV. In June 2011 Twitch was launched from the same creators of Justin TV and a few years later Justin TV shut down. Twitch had close to 3.2 million unique visitors a month during its first year. The monthly visitors quickly grew from 3.2 million to 20 million visitors in 2012 and in 2013 Twitch would become the number one video game streaming site at 45 million visits a month.

As live-streaming video platform, Twitch allows anyone to broadcast their own content on camera in real time (streamers) and anyone to watch, comment on, and even participate. Streamers can additionally record broadcasts and post them for video on-demand viewing later.

In comparison to Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook Live, Twitch focuses on publicly live-streamed content, as opposed to a closed group, and usually longer than a few minutes. They cleverly use gamification to make the experience on the platform more addictive, like leaderboards for subscribers, exclusive badges and emoticons. The platform has leapt in popularity over the past eight years – averaging one million concurrent viewers last year – creating massive value for viewers, streamers, advertisers, and as of 2014, Amazon.

Here comes Amazon

In 2014, Twitch grabbed the attention of Amazon and shortly there after an all-cash deal of $970 million was made.

“In the run-up to being acquired by Amazon, it was a crazy time at Twitch because we were growing really fast, everything was breaking all the time because every system that we had put in place turned out not to be sufficiently scaled…There’s just so much going on and it was a real relief when we finally finish the process. Twitch Prime has been massive for us and we never could have done Twitch Prime without Amazon.

Like the ability to let any Amazon Prime customers get benefits on Twitch and get benefits for our streamers by upselling people into buying an Amazon Prime subscription. It’s just a great dynamic. It’s great for our streamers, it’s great for our viewers, it’s great for us good for Amazon.”
-Emmett Shear, Co-Founder of Twitch & Justin.TV

With Twitch being purchased by Amazon there have been some exciting technical advancements in the field of live streaming and video production, understandably so. Since the purchasing, Amazon has made some conscious investments in their new CDN infrastructure and hardware products under Amazon AWS Elemental Live. With Amazon as a financial and technological backer, Twitch is geared to continue to be the most robust and stable CND it’s been for a long time with all the benefits AWS has to offer.

Challenges of Live Streaming

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In a video workflow, an encoder compresses a video stream—taking high-quality production video as input, and producing compressed renditions while retaining optimal picture quality. While this is a complicated task when working with pre-recorded video files, for live video it is made even more difficult as the video processing needs to happen in real time: The encoder needs to be powerful enough to produce exactly one second of video every second it runs without fail so that viewers see an uninterrupted video stream, and those video outputs must include all sizes and formats needed to serve the full range of viewing devices.

This is technically challenging, and requires a flexible encoding solution that can keep pace with the breadth and depth of today’s video requirements.

Production Benefits Brought by AWS

When live video encoding needs to be done on-premises, such as when processing baseband SDI video sources, AWS Elemental Live efficiently formats live video for delivery to broadcast television and streaming to internet-connected devices. It processes video streams in real time, taking a live video source and compressing it into multiple versions for distribution to viewers.

Deployed on-premises as appliances or as AWS-licensed software on your infrastructure, AWS Elemental Live integrates seamlessly into an end-to-end real-time video delivery workflow. Through easy-to-update software, AWS Elemental Live lets you keep delivering high-quality video with the latest features and standards as screens and devices change.

Deploy anywhere, deliver everywhere

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AWS Elemental Live helps you deliver content from studio or remote facilities to subscribers on a global scale, or directly to AWS Elemental Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage for processing, packaging, or origin storage. Simply connect AWS Elemental Live directly to your cameras to capture and process live inputs as the first step in delivering linear, multiscreen, or live-to-VOD content.

Deliver Great Quality

Built-in quality-defined variable bitrate control (QVBR) automatically adjusts encoding to the level of complexity within each video frame, optimizing video quality and reducing stream bandwidth. Graphic overlays add a professional look-and-feel to video streams, and easy-to-apply motion graphics enhance viewing experiences.

Keep Innovating

Easily update video workflows and build new services with advanced support for 4K UHD, HDR, and graphical overlays. Keep ahead of new and emerging industry standards for input and output formats and stay ready to deliver outstanding experiences to new screens and devices. Take advantage of easy-to-update software to keep pace with industry standards so you can continue to deliver high-quality video as screens and devices evolve.

Simplify encoder management

You can control AWS Elemental Live via web interface or REST/XML APIs for easy integration in an appliance, cloud-based, or virtualized deployment. Or, manage multiple encoders as a cluster with AWS Elemental Conductor, an on-premises solution for managing live video workflows.

https://aws.amazon.com/elemental-live/
https://youtu.be/CISzLx6TbXc