Game video website Twitch How to make 1 billion dollar business?

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[Abstract] In 2010, Justin.tv was turned into Twitch, and in 2011 The E3 game show was officially unveiled.

Tencent Science and technology news game video site Twitch in the player circle is very prestigious, this May more because YouTube is interested in spending 1 billion of dollars to its incorporation of rumors, attracted wide attention. Twitch CEO Amite Cher (Emmett shear) is not a natural leader of the embryo, the location of the present is purely an accident. Now, however, the gaming video company he runs has been among the top video sites in the world and has been favored by countless players. It's hard to doubt how the young video streaming company, a fast-moving, from scratch to value 1 billion, has a story behind it.

The story of Twitch from the fall of 2010.

Giddien Yu Gideon Yu, a YouTube CFO, made a full profit after the company "remarried" Google (Weibo) at $1.65 billion. He then began investing in a 5% stake in the National Rugby League (NFL) San Francisco 49 (San Francisco 49ers), and a new venture called Justin.tv. At that time, Justin.tv's transformation was successful-winning 8 million of dollars in VCs, and the company was already generating revenue.

According to Michael Seibel, co-founder of Justin.tv, Giddien Yu walked into the company at this time, sending carbon in the snow, "he said, ' You've made some achievements, you've made some money, but you haven't done anything that really has any impact." You can continue to lie in the credit books and get paid, but it doesn't look like a start-up, or you can create something really good. ’”

Later, co-founder Justin Ken met with Dour Media's Matt Sanchez (Matt Sanchez), who was finally determined to launch some important projects.

After talking to Gideon and Matt, Justin.tv opened a new chapter--a two-piece, a company with two different tasks--a web site that plays video games for players, Twitch, mobile app Socialcam for sharing video. Co-founder Amite Cher also began to evolve from an engineer to a manager.

It is these changes that have led to the success of the Twitch, which has grown into the world's most valuable video streaming company. Now, Twitch's name has been included in Google's shopping list, rumored to be priced at $1 billion trillion. In Tuesday, the company announced that it would gradually shut down justin.tv and devote more resources to twitch.

Twitch founder-childhood partner Shea and Ken

Childhood partners, Shea and Ken, are in the northern Seattle School of Evergreen gifted Children (the Evergreen parochial for gifted Children). They are good at maths, like the card game "The Gathering", and then meet. Later, the two chose a different high school, but still joined the NASA competition, and a few years later, the good partners finally come together to join the Yale University. Junior year, this small start on the first venture--kiko, this is a bit like Google Calendar application.

At the time, it was hard to imagine that Shea would make it today. At that time, he was just an ordinary engineer, code farmer, often late at night to adjust his company's software. In the company's own words, Shea is the co-founder of Technology and needs to "board" with a person with good design and product awareness, or a good marketing staff. Until Kiko was sold at a price of 250,000 dollars, the entrepreneurial passions hidden in the hearts of Shea and Ken two were finally ignited.

"I wanted to create an internet company, but I didn't really understand it until I graduated from college," Shea said. When I first went to college, I wanted to do research, but then I realized that it was only in engineering that I could get my blood boiling. ”

Shea and Ken have found Paul Graham Paul Graham, founder of the Silicon Valley incubator Company Y Combinator (YC). Ingraham asked very directly: "Do you have any good things?" Then the two men showed their ideas. Ingraham immediately: "It is so good, I want to subsidize you." Ken and Shea left with a 50,000-dollar cheque and a second ticket to the YC.

Shea--superb engineering capabilities show

In early 2007, Amazon called for Shea and Ken to temporarily limit bandwidth. Amazon offered a lot of services at the time, supporting startups to migrate live video and other heavily bandwidth-intensive programs to a remote-paying server. Justin.tv's online live video poses a challenge to Amazon's services.

Despite temporary controls, it has driven a change in Justin.tv, which has started to buy its own servers and build infrastructure to process live video. Now, the company has 15 data centers, processing 55 million video user requests per month, with an average of 106 minutes per user watching video every day.

"The idea of creating a global network of point-to-point networks that allows them to send high-quality, high-speed video to users may seem counterintuitive," said Ethan Kurzweil, Twitch Investor and Bessemer Company. He added that Shea was aware of the importance of quality of service, ease of use, and was constantly emphasizing this at the beginning of the company's inception.

Shea and several employees, including Kevin Lin (Kevin Lin, successor Twitch COO), quickly realised that video game broadcasting was the main source of growth for justin.tv. They are ecstatic because they themselves are gamers, and also vaguely see the potential to spread video games via the Internet.

At the same time, Ken and Sebel noticed another trend: everyone was buying smartphones, and almost everyone was starting to use these devices to surf the internet. After talks with Gideon and Matt in 2010, the Justin.tv team decided to start two projects: a service--justin.tv game focused on game video streaming, later Twitch, and mobile apps--later Socialcam.

Justin.tv transformation has been a great success

6 months later, all two projects have been successful. Surprisingly, the Justin.tv team decided to split the Socialcam and take over the service by Sebel and several other engineers. After a long talk with Gideon in 2010, Justin.tv was turned into Twitch and unveiled at the E3 game show in 2011.

In the process of establishing Twitch, Shea's ability to design and conceive of products is undoubtedly revealed. He notes that maintaining video quality is essential, and that the entire service should revolve around the needs of broadcasters, which are also important reasons for the success of the Twitch two. It is in these details that the well-known player, Cosmo Wright, is attracted to this platform (Wright is The Legend of Zelda: The Time of the flute (the Legend of Zelda:ocarina), the shortest record creator: 18 minutes 10 seconds).

Within a year of E3 's debut, Twitch attracted 20 million viewers and introduced paid projects to generate revenue for broadcasters. Twitch's users pay attention to video games, and this has become an advertiser's banknote printing machine. Twitch.tv formally from the concept to the finished product, players can only play video games, to live online games.

Of course, for Shea and Twitch, everything is not as smooth as it seems. Last week, Twitch launched the new "mute" tool when he accidentally set the dragon-the tool is meant to remove the original video audio, insert the design of the authorized background music, hoping to protect users from copyright disputes; Unfortunately, after the release of the game because of the background music recognized improper, so many old video has become a "pantomime", for a time, the anger is difficult to ping. However, Shea said it was only a minor accident and stressed that Twitch would continue to work for the player community.

Perhaps because of the location of the engineer sat for too long, Shell just try water management work, everything is still pro-Pro. However, according to Ken revealed, "from the Twitch concept of the shell, to build a small team, and then to the strength of the team, Shea has become the most competent manager here." ”

"It was a dramatic shift, with an introverted engineer turning into an extrovert who inspired more than 100 people fighting for a common goal," said Kyle Vogt, co-founder of Justin.tv.

Shell's enthusiasm for the game, the Twitch community, the broadcaster's focus, so that a partner to favor the success-for those traditional game developers, Twitch is a new, huge marketing tool. A year or so after the launch of Twitch, a number of game giants, including World of Warcraft, Call of Duty developer Activision-blizzard Blizzard, have started to promote their products through this platform. Mike Morhaime, co-founder and CEO of Blizzard, Maik Mo Huaimi that the official twitch.tv channel of the card Game "The Stone Legend" (Hearthstone) has attracted a lot of attention, and many players have watched the introduction before the update was launched.

In the traditional case, such hype requires high marketing costs, but with the help of Twitch, the developer's contact with the audience becomes simpler, and the audience is the real player who wants to know more about the game. Mo Huaimi said, "The story of the Furnace stone in the Twitch performance is exciting, which stimulated the attention to the content of the game." ”

Under Shea's leadership, Twitch agreed with Microsoft and Sony that the service integrates into Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles. But his wisest decision is more than that-he keeps the team away from advertisers before Twitch plans to sell his own ads.

"For Twitch, all they have to do is mobilize the advertisers ' enthusiasm, there's no need to sell anything," Kurzweil points out, "it doesn't seem like a great strategy at first, but it's really smart--last year, there was an ad sales team inside the team, and I've never seen such an efficient sales force. ”

The game community is growing as fast. Twitch became the top live streaming media platform for players to bring game channels running 24 hours a day.

At the same time, Twitch is also exploring more new online streaming media services, including the famous "Twitch play Pokemon" (Twitch plays Pokemon)-users in the chat room input game instructions, simulation Gameboy game "Pokemon" can execute orders, So tens of thousands of people played this classic game on the same machine. The success of "Twitch plays Pokemon" has brought twitch.tv a new branch of the game-involving the audience. Last week, "Little Fish Playing" Pokemon "(fish plays Pokemon) also quickly became popular--tens of thousands of people watch a fish" play "game (convert the fish's position into a game action in the fish tank) online.

Today, Twitch has caused a sensation, but also more than 1 billion dollars olive branch, but Shea is still rare modesty, "anyway, we are still a website, people can come to see video, chat video." In many ways, our business is more akin to Vimeo and YouTube than to the fight against Blizzard. We are more like a social network, a media company, just happen to focus on video game content. "(Bushi)