14 DAY TRIAL // Twitch is reportedly attracting more online viewers each day than similar sports, news and other general streaming channels.
Although the news is hardly surprising, the extent of Twitch's hold on streaming is incredible, if we are to believe a recent analysis.
According to Qwilt, Twitch is responsible for over 43 percent of the total livestream audience in the entire world. The website places WWE in second place in the United States, followed by Ustream, ESPN, CNN and Skynews.
On a global scale, Twitch ranks in the top five entertainment websites in many of the countries taken into consideration. Twitch itself claimed internal statistics point to over 45 million unique viewers per month in 2013.
Twitch said that gaming streams attracted a total of 71 million views in 2014, and that 58 percent of its users spend more than 20 hours each week watching streams, averaging 106 minutes per day.
Comscore placed the popular gaming streaming website in first place in terms of traffic, surpassing by far every other outlet, and even YouTube's live division.
Video solutions company Qwilt calls Twitch "the Netflix of spectator gaming," offering a more in-depth analysis of how and why the streaming service became this popular, also revealing Twitch's impressive stats for 2013, registering an average of 12 billion minutes of gaming watched every month.
The company points out that Twitch created a great platform that got to critical mass quickly, and especially through direct integration with game systems, it made it very easy for gamers to share their gameplay through live streams.
The recent integration with Xbox One is a great example of how Twitch secured its hold on gaming stream. According to a blog post from the Xbox team, the Twitch app shared in the success of Titanfall's launch, as during its first day, the Twitch Xbox One app accounted for 30 percent of all broadcasts on the service.
The numbers were similar when Twitch streaming was integrated in Sony's PlayStation 4 home entertainment system, the console being responsible for around 25 percent of all streaming recorded since the app was launched.
Furthermore, Twitch just announced that it plans to start supporting mobile game broadcasting, in addition to console and PC. Its simple-to-use interface and seamless integration make it tempting for users to use broadcast mode as the default configuration of their gameplay sessions.
The video solutions company concludes that established streaming media giants are crushing online video delivery, and are in part at fault for Twitch's growing success. Traditional content providers and commercial content delivery networks use redundant streaming methods that are massively inefficient, consuming enormous capacity on operator networks and slowing traffic.
