Twitch edges out TV as traffic soars

A big weekend for eSports events meant streaming video service Twitch had its most popular day yet.

By the end of Sunday, August 11th, Twitch.tv had clocked more than 4.5m unique viewers as gamers logged on to watch streaming video feeds of events like World Championship Series Season 2 Regional Finals and the DOTA International 3 tournament.

Over 550 million minutes of video were watched, with an average viewing time of over two hours per viewer – stats that Twitch says beats out traditional TV.

That audience rivals, and in many cases exceeds, network television,” said marketing VP?Matthew DiPietro. We’ve skyrocketed to 38m monthly unique visitors in only two years, so we have a lot of experience dealing with high traffic numbers.

With a number of events all coinciding on the same weekend, we knew we would be pushed to new heights, so we scaled up in the US and at our EU data centre.”

Twitch chief revenue officer Jonathan Simpson-Bint will talk at the London Games Conference about the explosion of video game video streaming. Book a ticket at www.londongamesconference.com.