YouTube live and Twitch

Abstract

User-Generated live video streaming systems are services that allow anybody to broadcast a video stream over the Internet. These Over-The-Top services have recently gained popularity, in particular with e-sport, and can now be seen as competitors of the traditional cable TV. In this paper, we present a dataset for further works on these systems. This dataset contains data on the two main user-generated live streaming systems: Twitch and the live service of YouTube. We got three months of traces of these services from January to April 2014. Our dataset includes, at every five minutes, the identifier of the online broadcaster, the number of people watching the stream, and various other media information. In this paper, we introduce the dataset and we make a preliminary study to show the size of the dataset and its potentials. We first show that both systems generate a significant traffic with frequent peaks at more than 1 Tbps. Thanks to more than a million unique uploaders, Twitch is in particular able to offer a rich service at anytime. Our second main observation is that the popularity of these channels is more heterogeneous than what have been observed in other services gathering user-generated content.

Social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on Twitch

“…The platform-specific investigations have been able to show that while certain games are continuously popular (Deng et al, 2016), content preference and popularity changes over time. This is exemplified by new game releases (Kaytoue et al, 2012) and that viewer counts for particular streams can be somewhat accurately predicted (Kaytoue et al, 2012), highlighting the various patterns in internet traffic related to the service (Kaytoue et al, 2012;Pires and Simon, 2015). As Twitch has matured as a platform, and the structure with which streamers construct their broadcasts seems to have stabilized (Bingham, 2017), recent studies have looked into the various affordances and elements that are being utilized on Twitch (Lessel et al, 2018;Sjöblom et al, 2019).…”

Real-Time Dashboards to Support eSports Spectating

“…Our work focuses on the latter scenario. Twitch and YouTube Live are two of the biggest live video streaming services [40] used by gamers across the globe [51]. These services allow players to stream their game live to millions of viewers.…”

The politics of user-platform relationships: Co-scripting live-streaming on Twitch.tv

“…Twitch has been a pioneer in live-streaming, and is a highly popular platform with more than 15 million daily viewers and 140 million unique monthly viewers [1]. It has established itself as the leading live-streaming platform in America, Europe and Asia (Pires and Simon, 2015;Taylor, 2018). Twitch is designed for live-streaming of both amateur and professional content, and though it accommodates various kinds of content, it is most famous for streaming video game play, where broadcasters combine live footage of gaming with running commentary and community interactions.…”