Twitch.tv
| Community | Gamers, Craftsmen, Musicians, Entertainment |
| Membership | Free |
| Privacy | features that support privacy |
| Self Identity | Video Streaming Site |
| Features | unique features |
| Status | |
| Launch Date | June 6, 2011 |
| Users | 45 million+ |
Twitch.tv is a platform used for live video streaming focusing mainly on video games. Streamers, the user's creating and preforming the live video content, broadcast everything from video game play-throughs to talk shows to live tournament events. Since it was founded in 2011, Twitch has seen steady increases in numbers of new visitors and streamers, and in 2015, Twitch announced it was hosting over 1.5 million broadcasters and 100 million visitors each month.
History
Twitch.tv was founded in 2011; however, its roots go back to Justin.tv, formed in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmet Shear. Originally, their concept of the website centered around Justin Katz wearing a hat with a video camera and microphone attached and going about broadcasting his everyday activities or as the termed was coined, a "Lifecast". Later, they divided the site into different categories with gaming becoming the most popular by far. With the unprecedented success of the gaming section on Justin.tv, the company decided to devote an entirely new website to this category naming it Twitch.tv, after the term "twitch gameplay", which refers a gamer's ultra quick reaction times to certain in-game scenarios. Ever since, Twitch.tv has completely dominated the video game streaming and entertainment market. Other video content sites such as Youtube have made an attempt to boost their gaming prominence, but have not had much luck.
Users & Audience
For the most part, content on Twitch consists mostly of video game play throughs and live video game tournaments; however, recently there has been an increase in the amount of creative content. For example, pianoimproman is a Twitch streamer that plays piano songs that viewers request as well as some of his originals. He averages almost 17k views each time he goes live, and is evidence of the surge of creative content on Twitch.
