Twitch social video

We all love video.

Skyping friends who live abroad. Sneezing pandas. Mannequin Challenges. Is ‘You’ve Been Framed’ still on the telly?

The subject matter may vary but a video can do much more than just words or a static image can.

It is forecast that by 2017 video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic. Animoto tells us that 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.

We all like watching videos, so isn’t this how we should be talking to our clients? In fact, this should really be a video post, but I’m camera shy.

So, to Twitch. You may or may not have heard of it but your kids probably have. Twitch is a live streaming platform. Twitch is huge.

Twitch started with gamers streaming their gameplay to willing audiences, keeping up a running commentary of what they’re doing and what the viewer is seeing.

Twitch now has a more mainstream appeal. With the launch of IRL (In Real Life), users can share their lives and broadcast anything - from cooking demonstrations to art tutorials. You can even watch other people eat while you eat your dinner (although I’m not sure why you’d want to).

Twitch is inherently social, with live audience chat accompanying every broadcast. It has over two million streamers on its network per month, with nearly 10 million daily users. Viewers spend more than 1.5 hours a day watching. Like I said, Twitch is huge.

There are sponsorship opportunities with the most popular streamers, ranging from standard display media and video content to product placement within the video feed and name-checks by the broadcaster.

If you’re cool enough and have enough money to spend, you can create your own channel perfectly tailored to your audience.

So you can see the appeal. Live streaming feels like a new space but we know this is happening now. So take a look at Twitch and see what you’re missing.