Introduction – Twitch
The live video streaming website like Twitch market value is propelling at an alarming rate nowadays as well as changing trends of customers’ behavior with customized features and advanced technology. Twitch is a social video platform where gamers can broadcast, watch and talk about video games. Twitch’s video platform is the backbone of both live and distribution for the entire video game ecosystem. This includes game developers, publishers, media outlets, events, user-generated content, and the entire esports scene. In February 2014, WallStreet Journal ranked Twitch as the 4th largest website in terms of peak internet traffic in the U.S. fortifying the brand as an entertainment industry leader and the epicenter of social video for gamers.
The demand for live video streaming platforms is on rising since Twitch is generating 3.8 million unique broadcasters over February 2020. Twitch was hoping to see an ad revenue between
$500 million to $600 million, but it ended up generating almost $1 Billion in 2020.
The popularity of video streaming website development has brought new resources for multiple industries than just entertainment. Online conferences, Live workshops, Webinars, and live events are in the spike for businesses to transform physical events into digital through live video streaming platforms. The promising stats and revenue model of Twitch triggered enterprise businesses to build a live video streaming platform like Twitch that generates revenue in Billions.
Live Video streaming is the new future of video content and it’s only going to grow in the coming years.
Twitch has raised a total of $35M in funding over 3 rounds. From a Series C round, their latest funding was raised on 30th September 2013 and is funded by 9 investors. Its one of the most recent investors among all is Thrive Capital and Nelstone Ventures.
There are 6 organizations acquired by twitch and the most recent among them was IGDB.com on September 18, 2019.
When players are broadcasting videos, they usually add audio comments via a webcam appearing in the corner of the screen. As well as this, platform users are involved in live chat with gamers who have similar interests. Such interactive chatting creates a real-life social experience in the digital world.
However, Twitch users use the platform for more than video game live streaming:
- Twitch hosts E-tournaments and upcoming games demos.
- The platform users use Twitch for video game tutorials, when, many users can interact with each other and the instructor in real-time.
- Also, Twitch performs as a software development learning environment where user communities stream programming projects and talk through their work.
Apart from gaming, Twitch also has non-gaming live-streaming categories, like IRL (In Real Life), Talk Shows, Creative, and even Cooking.
Factors that help you to provide the right live streaming business modal:
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Security
- Flexibility: It can be one of the most important factors among all. The flexibility of the live streaming solution providers defines several aspects, namely customizable to your business needs, aligns to your feature set, and promising infrastructure to scale your live video streaming business. Other than the customization factors, the live streaming website must be flawless on multiple platforms and devices like Desktop, Mobile, and all types of screen sizes.
- Scalability: It measures the system’s ability to decrease or increase performance. It measures the company’s ability to grow. Whatever user count or devices, a scalable live streaming website can withstand more than billions of live video streams at a concurrent time. The online streaming platform can stream live content without any lag on any platform irrespective of bandwidth.
- Security: An effective live video streaming website like Twitch must possess enterprise-grade security and privacy protocols for the live content. Usage of multiple Digital Management Rights, Access control, and privacy watermarks can safeguard the content against copyrights issues.
How to monetize a live streaming video platform like Twitch with some business model that includes revenue sources:
Now, let's find out how you could make money from live streaming websites like Twitch:
- Subscription model: You can charge platform users monthly or annual subscription fees. In exchange, you can provide users with premium content or advanced platform features. Twitch users can buy a subscription from the following options $4.99, $9.99,
$24.99 per month. A paid subscription allows users to watch videos without ads and use premium Twitch features. Twitch premium features include an Expanded Emoticon Set, Custom Chat Username Colors, Priority customer support, and so on.
- Advertisements: Running ads on your streaming platform is another live streaming business model. Twitch charges a cost per mile (CPM) fee from gaming companies, portals, and developers for running ads which played a vital role in the supporting modals. The cost of CPM varies between $2-$10.
For this monetization model, you can choose among the following options:
Pre-roll: Ads run before the stream begins Mid-roll: Ads run alongside the live stream Post-roll: Ads run after the event
- Donations: Users may like to show their appreciation and donate money so you can make your online service even better. To empower your website with this feature, embed a build-in “donate” button.
- Partners: To support favorite streamers, Twitch users buy paid subscriptions for some channels. Twitch splits the subscription cost 50/50 with the channel owner.
The roadmap of resources used to create a live streaming website like Twitch
Here are some resources, which are required to build your live video streaming platform:-
1. Business vision
Here what you need to identify is? What do you want your potential live streaming platform to be according to your goals? This is the way, you will give your business a clear focus and avoid headings in the wrong direction. Thus the most important vision is that you need to research your competitors and choose your niche. You also need to decide how your streaming platform will stand out and how to attract users. You can formalize a live streaming platform business vision by writing a vision statement.
2. Discovery (inception) phase
You and your website development company team will create a Functional specification describing the inner logic of your website, the feature list, and so on. This document should also include functional requirements relating to ways the product must behave, and non-functional requirements explaining the general software characteristics.
3. Tech stack
Now, it is time, you need to select the platform that will power your live streaming website and third-party services to integrate. You can choose among existing live streaming platforms such
as Vplayed, Brightcove, and Contus Vplay or develop a custom one. At this stage, your development team will also create server architecture, database schema, and other live video streaming solutions.
4. Design
To create an engaging design, you and your team will go through several steps. First, you, as the main stakeholder, should visualize your vision of the website layout and elements by creating sketches. Then, the team will use those sketches to create a wireframe for every screen of your website. Next, they will turn wireframes into a website prototype to receive feedback from you. Only after approving the prototype, the team will start developing the website design.
5. Development
The team will begin building the front-end, back-end, and adding third-party integrations such as payment gateway. Such projects require the integration of comprehensive cloud architecture for keeping and streaming a large amount of data. Thus, we recommend starting the development off with a live streaming website MVP. The MVP will include high-priority features, such as user profile, live streaming player, and others. In this way, you can validate your business concept and minimize risks for your business.
6. Testing
Testing is one of the major resources for finalizing and for a successful launch, the QA team of technology specialists will thoroughly test your live streaming website to ensure every website element operates correctly. To achieve this, the QA team runs both manual and automated testing.
7. Second development stage
At last, after the launch of your streaming platform, gather feedback from users to decide what features they want you to implement next. Honest user feedback may point out some disadvantages in your platform. By using such feedback, you can select a list of features to implement during the second development stage and improve your website.
In a nutshell
As you can see, live streaming sites like Twitch are becoming new social networks where people share the same interests and build communities for their and other interests.
As for the live-streaming itself, it is a prospective technology. You can apply live streaming, not only for gaming, but in almost every industry such as education, online retail, and so on. As the world is moving towards video blogging. People are more engaged in the videos which bring them comfort and exact go-through information by a comfortable medium. Still, to build a live streaming website, you will need a well-thought-out business vision, as well as a bunch of advanced technologies to provide users with high-quality video transmission. To find out whether your business idea has earning potential, launch your streaming platform as MVP and add other features during the second development stage.
It helps enterprises, media professionals, video publishers to build a live streaming website development company in india complete with features for publishing, broadcasting, managing, and measuring video performance from a single dashboard.
