Twitch (service)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · Spun off from Justin.tv, San Francisco · Also known as TwitchTV; Twitch.tv

What it is

Twitch is a website and app where people broadcast live video of themselves, most often playing video games, while viewers watch at the same moment and type messages into a chat box beside the picture. The person broadcasting, called a streamer, reads the chat and answers out loud. Viewers can pay a monthly subscription to a streamer's channel or send small tips, and Twitch keeps a share. Amazon has owned it since 2014.

Where it came from

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear started Justin.tv in San Francisco in 2007. At first Kan broadcast his own life around the clock from a camera on his cap. Other people got channels, gaming became the most watched category, and in June 2011 the company spun it off as TwitchTV. It grew quickly as esports (organised competitive gaming) took off and its rival Own3d.tv closed in 2013. In August 2014 Justin.tv shut down and Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million.

How people used it

People left a stream running for hours in the background while they did other things. In chat they talked to the streamer and to each other, mostly in emotes: tiny pictures typed as words, such as Kappa, a grey face that marked a message as sarcastic. When something big happened on screen, thousands of people flooded chat with the same emote or the same pasted paragraph at once. Streamers spoke to the crowd as a single person called "chat". Viewers paid to have their messages read aloud, and big streamers ended their broadcasts with a "raid", sending their whole audience to a smaller channel.

Why it mattered

It made playing games for an audience into a job. Streamers like Ninja, who played Fortnite with the rapper Drake on stream in 2018, earned millions, and rivals paid them to leave: Microsoft's Mixer signed Ninja in 2019 and closed in 2020. For viewers the draw was company. The streamer might say your username out loud, and a chat of 50,000 people could feel like a room you were sitting in. Its rows mattered as well: banned streamers, a 2021 leak showing what top streamers were paid, and a 2022 ban on gambling streams that pushed some to the rival site Kick.

The jokes around it

• Kappa: a grey face typed after a message to show it wasn't meant seriously.
• PogChamp, later just "Pog": a shocked face meaning "that was amazing". Twitch removed the original in January 2021 after the man pictured posted encouraging more unrest following the US Capitol riot.
• "F in the chat": everyone types the letter F to pay respects when something goes wrong on stream.
• Copypasta: a block of text that chat pastes over and over, usually to tease the streamer.
• "Twitch Plays": games controlled by typed chat commands, copied from Twitch Plays Pokémon in 2014.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Millions of people spent their evenings watching someone else play a game because the stream came with company. A lot of the money went on being noticed: a tip got your name read out, and a chat full of the same emote made strangers feel they were in one room.

What noah is not sure of

The traffic and viewer figures (fourth largest source of US peak traffic in 2014, monthly viewer counts) come from the supplied Wikipedia text and weren't checked independently. The exact wording of the post that got PogChamp removed is summarised from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.