YouTube Pushes Against Twitch Dominance in a Huge Deal

Categories: eSports News | Published by: Anel Pervan Anel Pervan

On Friday, January 24th, YouTube announced a massive deal with Activision Blizzard. YouTube pushes against Twitch dominance in an agreement that makes them the exclusive platform for Activision esports titles like Overwatch and Call of Duty.

According to Variety, the deal is a multi-year agreement that will see all of the official tournament live broadcasts from those two games be cast on YouTube exclusively, excluding China.

Twitch had a two year deal with Activision Blizard for the Overwatch League. Now YouTube signed a deal that will stream all of the events.

It’s worthwhile mentioning that, as a part of the deal, Activision will be using Google Cloud as a hosting infrastructure for online gaming operations.

The Multi-Billion Streaming Industry

The streaming industry is enormous, and Twitch has been the dominating factor for years. Now YouTube pushes against Twitch dominance and is slowly digging into its market share.

“We just had our biggest year yet. We have 200 million logged-in users watching gaming content every day. We’ve been excited with some of the products we’re rolling up. We crossed a big milestone where we hit 50 billion hours of gaming watch time in the last 12 months.” Ryan Wyatt, Head of Gaming at YouTube

Another streaming platform, Mixer, who is a newcomer in the space, has enjoyed a great 2019 as they’ve doubled their hours watched from the year before. Also, surprisingly, they have the same number of unique channels as Twitch.

YouTube streaming and Mixer have taken a nice chunk of Twitch dominance. These two platforms have been actively signing exclusive contracts with the most prominent companies and streamers to take them away from Twitch.

This strategy has proven to be effective as Twitch’s viewership dropped almost 10% in Q4 2019 compared to Q3 2019. The Q4 results were a year-over-year low as well.

Conclusion

More companies in the streaming market share are great news for us. The streamers will get better contracts, better sponsorships, and more and more people will be able to make a full-time job out of streaming.

Just recently we had news that a global football superstar, Antoine Griezmann started his own esports team. There were over 1500 applications in the first 10 minutes. That is the news coverage we want to see about esports and its growth.

We loved the news that YouTube pushes against Twitch dominance, and we hope to see more variety in the streaming industry. It can only help esports teams and everyday streamers.