Amazon’s Twitch Starts Rival to TikTok in Short-Form Video
The logo for Twitch is displayed on a smartphone in an arranged photograph taken in Little Falls, New Jersey, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. Twitch’s market share of hours streamed jumped to 91% in the third quarter, up 15% from the second quarter, according to a report from streaming-software provider Streamlabs, which used data from Stream Hatchet.
(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming site Twitch launched its own short-form video platform, a week after passage of a law that threatens the future of the social-media service TikTok in the US.
Creators on Twitch typically livestream themselves playing video games or chatting with audiences, sometimes for up to eight hours at a time. The new service, called Discovery Feed, allows viewers to scroll through short clips taken from those longer videos. It appears as a new tab on Twitch’s mobile app.
Discovery Feed has a ways to go before becoming a significant rival to TikTok. Early posts viewed by Bloomberg included an Arizona State University professor welcoming students to class and a streamer getting attacked on the street.
Unlike TikTok, Twitch creators generally don’t upload their own short-form content. Instead users pick out funny or entertaining segments from creators’ livestreams and turn them into clips.
The Discovery Feed will be “personalized based on a viewer’s watch history and real-time interactions,” a Twitch spokesperson said.
That will potentially include mature content, provided it meets Twitch’s guidelines, the spokesperson said.
TikTok is a division of China’s ByteDance Ltd. Congress and the Biden Administration are forcing ByteDance to divest the service or face a ban out of concern that China’s government could use the app for propaganda or spying on US residents. The app has 170 million monthly users in the US.
Twitch and TikTok have been taking pages from each other’s playbooks for years. In 2022, TikTok launched a live subscription option, which was reminiscent of Twitch’s offering. TikTok’s livestreaming product has not put much of a dent in Twitch’s market share, however.
Streamers won’t receive a cut of the ad revenue that appears on Discovery Feed because the commercials appear between their clips and not directly in them, according to a Twitch spokesperson.
(Updates with company comment on mature content in sixth paragraph.)
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