Twitch is a streaming service that I’m sure most of us are familiar with. The service recently became accessible to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Gamers can finally stream and watch their favorite video games right from their consoles. Though we may see Twitch hit the mobile market soon on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS.
Speaking to Games Industry, Twitch COO Kevin Lin talked about the service and the challenges they had bringing the application to consoles.
Historically it’s been really tough to stream console and mobile games. PC has always been easy because you’re just setting up the software. To broadcast console you had to buy a capture card and cabling, then configure all your software. It was very tedious.
Now each of those consoles represents about 20 per cent of overall broadcasters. There’s about 250,000 unique broadcasters per month from each. We’re pretty excited about those growth opportunities.
Now the service may hit the mobile market. If there’s enough interest and the ability to figure out just how to incorporate the application, Twitch just might land on the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS.
Handhelds – that’s something we’d love to do. On handhelds it’s more of a server/CPU concern, but we definitely want to do it. We want to build viewing apps, that’s much less CPU intensive than broadcasting.