When it comes to the game and e-sports streaming scene, Twitch is the 800-pound gorilla. But when it comes to online video as a whole, YouTube is the dominant force, which is why the early reports that Google was going to buy Twitch were a little strange. Google has all the infrastructure and technology to deliver video—including live game streaming—and in fact, Google does the job better than Twitch.

What Twitch has is a very strong brand, as the site people go to for livestreams of people playing games. It wasn't crazy for Google to consider a buyout of that brand and its loyal users, but in the end, it probably wasn't the easiest way for Google to make a play in the space.

It's all a bit moot, since Google backed down its reported plans for a Twitch buyout (reportedly amid antitrust concerns), and Twitch is now a part of Amazon instead. But if Google wants to be a part of the game streaming market—and there are good reasons why it would—it's extremely well positioned, even without Twitch.

Most big Twitch streamers already have a YouTube presence. That's because Twitch has never been very good at archival. Twitch is where you go to catch a live broadcast, but if you want to watch it later, YouTube has always been better. Twitch doesn't have any good way of managing historic broadcasts, creating playlists, or cross-linking and promoting videos. YouTube has these in abundance.

In spite of this, Twitch did offer permanent storage of past broadcasts until very recently. As of today, that's largely going away. Twitch is deleting most of its archived broadcasts these days, with only highlight videos retained on the service. For users who want to save past streams, Twitch has now made it easier than ever to directly archive streams on YouTube. Even if some broadcasters weren't doing this before, they're almost certain to do it now.

Twitch will, for the time being, be the best place to go for live streams. But for a persistent online video presence, Twitch is making sure that YouTube continues to have the edge. This has significant implications if Google wants in on the streaming market. Google doesn't have to make a name for itself, and it doesn't need to make gamers and game watchers start tuning in to YouTube: they already are.

Indeed, the streaming gamer with the most followers on Twitch is syndicate; he has just over 1 million followers on Twitch. But he's a YouTuber first and foremost, with just shy of 8 million subscribers there. PewDiePie made his name with (somewhat edited) videos on YouTube and has a whopping 30.1 million subscribers on YouTube, but he's managed to cross over into successful live streaming, too, with about 300,000 followers on Twitch.

Live stream-oriented broadcasters have similar cross-platform appeal. In the Dota 2 streaming community (which I'm intimately familiar with), the two biggest English language event broadcasters each have a comparable presence on both sites. Beyond the Summit with BTS has 134,000 followers on Twitch and 150,000 on YouTube; joinDOTA has 84,000 followers on Twitch and 206,000 on YouTube.

This isn't to say that all streamers have a huge YouTube presence. Currently, the most popular game on Twitch is League of Legends, and the top streamer is Nightblue3. That streamer has 493,000 Twitch followers (he's about the 7th most popular streamer on Twitch), but under 23,000 subscribers on YouTube. Popular Dota 2 player and streamer SingSing has 121,000 followers on Twitch and 68,000 on YouTube. Many of the individual streamers and pro players have a similar sort of pattern.

Obviously these communities do not overlap entirely, but they do overlap substantially. They're serving the same kind of viewers and offering the same kind of content. This is only natural: YouTube is Twitch's DVR, as it were, and with the recent Twitch changes, it's clear that Twitch wants things to be that way.

Building, not buying, a brand

While YouTube already has a huge audience for game videos, what it lacks at the moment is the thing that it would have picked up with Twitch: a brand that's strongly associated with streaming. The task for Google now is to get streamers and broadcasters to think of YouTube as a streaming platform.

Google already has the technology that it needs to make a big livestreaming move, though in fairness, it hasn't had it for very long. YouTube's live streaming support has been around for a few years now to a select few, but it wasn't until late last year that Google quietly threw the switch and opened that support up to the general public. Popular streaming software, such as Open Broadcast Software and XSplit, already supports YouTube streaming.

Google already has a head start relative to many other up-and-coming streaming platforms, since the company can already handle the scale of a significant streaming presence. That makes them different from upstarts like hitbox.tv, which tried to win over streamers in the aftermath of some unpopular copyright changes made by Twitch, but promptly crumbled under the load.

Buying the brand would have been a good shortcut to getting the streamers, but it's not the only option Google has available. Especially not for a billion dollars. For a billion dollars, Google has a lot of power to buy exclusive streaming rights to major e-sports events, sponsor e-sports teams in return for exclusive streaming rights, and offer superior monetization of streams.

To become a popular site for game streamers, Google would have to fill in a few platform gaps, particularly around discovery. Twitch makes it easy to find people streaming a particular game; Google has no correspondingly straightforward way to find people with videos (or streams) of that game. Google would also do well to ensure that Sony and Microsoft supported YouTube streaming from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; currently, Twitch and Ustream are the only options on those platforms.

Any play for the game streaming audience wouldn't be an overnight success for Google and YouTube. Amazon and Twitch are going to be the leaders in the space for some time. But with Twitch broadcasters and Twitch itself already driving a ton of YouTube traffic, the opportunity is there for Google to capitalize on; the company just needs to decide if it really wants to.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson