Somehow missed this yesterday evening... Say hi to Curse, the newest member of the Twitch family — Twitch Blog Twitch itself is a subsidiary of Amazon. Personally, the acquirement is mixed quality news. Twitch will probably be good for Curse, gaining it access to more resources and longterm stability (maybe). At the same time, I live in Huntsville, the headquarters location for Curse and I wonder if they're eventually going to move out. They're one of the companies that give my town more reputation than just "rocket city".
I only remotely know what Twitch is, I think half of these streaming services will die off in a few years - so hopefully Amazon will be able to avoid this because I suspect YouTube will start trying to pull in their features.
There will always be a significant draw to services that let an average person share their life or interests in real time. Twitch is one of the largest streaming sites, so it'd likely take a major business mistake or a stop in development to kill it. Youtube is trying to steal some of the streamer love, but it's still behind Twitch. There's a couple decent competitors beyond those two as well.
Last night I was watching a live event on YouTube and the quality was great. It was something that not alot of people care about but at least 20 people were watching at any given time. After watching that, I became interested in what it would take to livestream some events. What surprised me was that there wasn't an easy, simple method that was quick and easy to implement. Twitch was one of the platforms that was suggested. What I really want is to download an app, point my phone at a live event, and everything get taken care of without all the fuss. YouTube looked relatively easy but you had to enable the livestreaming and then they had some very confusing language about using advertisers on a livestream (ie "this live feed brought to you by ******")