The story of Twitch begins in 2007 with a developer called Justin Kan. Freshly graduated from Yale University, he decided to live-stream his life, 24 hours a day. With a webcam affixed to his cap and a laptop in his backpack, he allowed people to view his life day and night. With that, Justin.tv was launched. While this channel was the first of its kind, Kan’s unusual idea quickly drew in media attention, and numerous internet users followed suite by broadcasting their own lives online. Kan ultimately ended up adding more channels to the network.
Just one year later, the newly founded business boasted a community of 30,000 broadcasters. At this time, live streaming technology was developing at a similarly fast pace to span across new genres, including sports, music, news, and finally, gaming. In the latter, users would film themselves playing PC and console games. This genre gained so much popularity, it spawned its own streaming platforms, resulting in the launch of Twitch.tv in 2011.
Since then, Justin.tv has closed its gates in order to focus on its much more successful daughter project. 2014 saw Amazon purchase Twitch Interactive Inc. for $970 million.
The streaming platform’s outreach is constantly expanding and as of 2016, has achieved record-breaking figures:
- 292 billion minutes of video content have been watched in total
- 2.2 million active broadcasters
- 14.2 billion messages have been sent via Twitch’s chat function.