On 2014-07-25, the Los Angeles Times reported "Google reportedly finalizes deal for live stream service Twitch".
In case you don't know, Twitch Interactive offers live streaming of people playing video games.
Google paid 1G$ (1 billion US dollars) to gain control of Twitch. It
sounds outragious to me, perhaps because I stopped playing wideogames
when PacMan and Pong were the rage of the time. But it makes sense:
Twitch has 45 million unique viewers per month (up from 3.2M since the
site was launched three years ago). "Twitchers" spend daily an average
of 106 minutes watching somebody else play video games, and 58% of them
do it for more than 20h a week. And when Google will merge Twitch into
YouTube, you can reasonably expect that more live activities will be
added.
OK. I admit it: all the craze of the past decade to post selfies and
videos has never excited me. I don't have this urge to show myself to
the world. What motivates me to publish this blog is the hope (dare I
say knowledge?) that, among all the chaff I write, there is
something that people will find useful or at least entertaining. Buried
among the postings about how to fold toilet paper (Toilet paper woes) and those containing micro-fiction (e.g., Being a Toad),
there are more serious articles. My most-viewed top three (perhaps not
surprising, about programming) have so far collected 11,484 page views (OO - UML Behavior Diagrams, OO - UML Structure Diagrams, and Fortran and Eclipse on the Mac).
Very far from the millions of hits of successful videos, but it still
gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to think that I helped thousands of
people in a practical way.
Humans are social animals. We have to give credit to people like Mark
Zuckerberg to have recognised it and to have been able to capitalise on
it. It is, in a sense, the logical evolution of the tabloid magazines.
A major difference though is that now everybody can feel a bit like a
celebrity, especially if [s]he agrees to bare body and soul to the
world!
FaceBook, YouTube, Flicker, and the rest of the "social" web sites let
everyone give in to exibitionism and, at the receiving end, voyeurism. I
don't understand how people can spend hours reading and writing
gossip. I only like YouTube because it lets me see old TV programs in
B&W and performances of my favourite singers.
The success of Twitch is just one more confirmation of this
exibitionism/voyeurism compact that drives the Internet (besides porn, of
course).
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