twitchcon2015
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This is what success looks like on Twitch
Twitch is exactly what you make of it. Looking for some dating advice while a broadcaster drinks wine and plays Minesweeper? There's a channel for that. How about a corny sci-fi show about a guy sent back from the future to conquer video games before they turn sentient and kill us all? You're covered there, too. And while those two channels on the livestreaming service are wildly different from one another, they share a commonality: Each requires a grueling amount of work to produce on a regular basis. Respective creators Sonja "OMGitsfirefoxx" Reid and Futureman Gaming took different paths to make it into Twitch's highly coveted Partner program, a revenue-sharing system between some 12,000 contracted broadcasters and the service. But their motivation to succeed hasn't stopped since they've "made it" and now earn a living from streaming on the site.
TwitchCon made me a Twitch convert
I'm going to admit this right up front: I wasn't looking forward to covering the first-ever TwitchCon. Sure, I co-host our weekly Playdate broadcasts and absolutely adore talking with our community of regulars who show up three times per week to watch us play games, but outside of that, I didn't spend time on Twitch. My worry for TwitchCon was that I'd be trapped inside Moscone West in San Francisco with thousands of screaming "personalities" -- like the guy I'd watched (for approximately 45 seconds, max) shout and swear his way through Choice Chamber, for an entire weekend. That all changed after attending a number of panels and talking with some of the biggest broadcasters on the service. This first show was one of the best events I've been to for work, period. And I recently found myself doing something I never thought: watching Twitch for fun.
Everything Twitch does is for its community
Twitch would be nothing without its broadcasters and viewers, and the livestreaming service is fiercely protective of both. So much so that to prevent its first-ever TwitchCon conference from transforming into a promotional event for exhibitors, rather than a meet-up for its community, the company was willing to turn down exhibitor support. The goal, as Matt DiPietro, Twitch's VP of marketing, explained it, was to keep the show laser focused on community so it doesn't turn into something like Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) have: huge but at the expense of their initial focus. "What TwitchCon has to be about is the broadcasters and their fans," he said in an interview from the show. "Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that's what brings the fans and creates the content."
Deadmau5 is on Twitch
If it weren't for Deadmau5's terrible broadband speeds, he wouldn't be on Twitch, the live video-streaming site favored by gamers. Prior to moving to the Canadian countryside just outside of Toronto and building "a goddamned death ray" in his back yard to get paltry 5 Mbps downloads, the electronic musician, whose real name is Joel Zimmerman, had relied on a gigabit connection to broadcast music-making sessions in 2K resolution using his own data service provider. "The quality was pretty comparable [to Twitch], but I didn't have a social network behind it to help it along," he said during an interview from the first-ever TwitchCon. Now his TriCaster streaming setup is as good as "a $50,000 doorstop," and he instead uses the open-source OBS streaming software to broadcast games like Rocket League, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive; and studio recording sessions from his basement like the rest of us.
Twitch goes full HTML5 in 2016, revamps private messages
Twitch is revamping its live-streaming systems in 2016, starting with a rollout of HTML5 video players and controls in Q2 2016. This means Twitch is officially ditching Flash. Second, Twitch's private-message program, Whispers, is getting an update that pops out personal messages so users don't miss them. Plus, these conversations will transfer from web to mobile and vice versa. Twitch will also allow streamers to create custom thumbnails for their past broadcasts and highlights. All of this info comes courtesy of today's TwitchCon 2015 keynote address.
Watch the first-ever TwitchCon keynote right here!
What do you do when you're a burgeoning video game start-up that gets bought by Amazon for just under a billion dollars? Well, if you're game-broadcasting platform Twitch, you take over the Moscone Center in San Francisco for a few days and host all manner of panels featuring the top people in your community, game developers and maybe even a few musical guests. TwitchCon kicks off with a keynote address at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT today and you can watch it below via, you guessed it, a Twitch streaming window. In addition to the opening address the weekend's panels and interviews will be broadcast as well.
