Youtube Gaming To Rival Twitch.

Take a moment to appreciate the fact that history is being made right here, right now. In the past year, competitive gaming has taken several leaps and bounds forward. Just a few months ago E-Sports was declared a sport by the US Government, and a number of games released or announced in recent months are being geared expressly towards being E-Sports; Evolve, Rainbow Six: Siege, and others.

As we move into this era of E-Sports, the company who controls HOW we view E-Sports will have a significant degree over the industry itself. But, before we can go into details about how this competition might play out, we need to discuss the competitors themselves.

Twitch, The Current Undisputed Champion of Live Video Games Streaming.

That’s a lot of free minutes. I bet AT&T are jealous.

Talk to any gamer worth their salt, and they’ll refer you to Twitch for your online gaming streaming needs. Released in June of 2011 as a spin off from Justin.tv, a relatively unknown general streaming site. Within two years, Twitch had surpassed its parent site, averaging 43 million viewers a month.

A year later (2014), a lot of good things began to happen for Twitch. In February, it was listed among the top five internet traffic locations in the United States. Later that year, as a result of their popularity, Twitch also began to embrace music based streams and content.

But the year wasn’t over for them. In September of 2014 Twitch was purchased for $970 million dollars by Amazon, the ecommerce giant.

Advantages held by this competitor? They’ve fully integrated with many gaming systems; Origin, Uplay, Nvidia, Minecraft, Eve Online, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS4, and Ouya. Those are all systems that have Twitch directly installed.

To sum up, Twitch is no pushover, especially with an average of 11 million videos broadcast per month and over 16 billion minutes watched by viewers every month. Check here for the source and other cool statistics.