As someone that views Twitch every day I can say I never watch the entirety of a stream. You drop in and view when you have time. It is less akin to watching a TV show and more like going to your friends house and hanging out to watch some of the game.
The thing is you don't have to sit down and watch a streamer for hours at a time. There's a variety of content that you can just switch over to someone else you follow that's streaming, or just watch the past broadcasts of streams you missed. It's kind of like watching youtube videos, or even traditional couch-surfing.
I spend an hour or so every night just browsing through streams to look for interesting content, swapping between games and IRLs. It's a good shift away from production TV content.
Twitch replaces TV and competes with YouTube and Netflix time for me. I watch it in a lossy manner, where it's usually on while I work from home. The only time I'm watching Twitch in a lossless manner is when a Starcraft tournament is on, and in that case it feels exactly like watching back to back hockey games: about 5-6 hours of competition on a weekend.
As a Twitch consumer (married 'professional' in early 30's). I am a huge video game nerd at heart, so I watch streamers that run games that I am interested in however don't have time to play/master. Often it doesn't involve me sitting down for hours at night (although I am sure there's a huge demographic that does that as well). I usually watch when I am laying in bed before I go to sleep. Same time my wife is usually watching some separate but equally mind numbing content to decompress from a long day.
Just another form of entertainment, like tv, but there's nothing I enjoy watching on tv. To each their own.
I’ve watched/listened to a few people for 10-20 minutes at a time. I know that’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve never been even the slightest bit interested in watching streams.
I watch streams to socialize, thanks to the chat function. I usually don't care much about the game they play and I only watch streams with less than 30 viewers.
I watch Twitch because I grew up playing lots of video games and now watching is less of a time commitment then playing the games.
Streamers aren't meant to be consumed by watching them every day for hours on end. I mean, I'm sure there are core fans who do that, probably students and single young professionals like you say, but my use case for Twitch is "hey, I have 10-20 minutes free; not even enough time for a full DotA game, but I can see which pro players happen to be online now and watch them play for a bit". This gives me (somewhat surprisingly) lots of the same satisfaction that playing games used to give me; plus it's a lot less stressful (I was mostly into competitive multiplayer games) and without any practice required to get good at the game.
Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
I think it depends on the person or the stream but I can tell you why I watch.
Occasionally I'll tune in for a big game and watch it the way people do sports, especially if my favorite team happens to be playing.
More often though, it just feels like a hang out the same way a podcast or talk radio can. Casual conversation with something in the game occasionally drawing attention.
I should say maybe I'm an edge case too. I probably only watch a couple hours a month.
Edit: ok I thought about it some more and I had one more thought.
Because there is a lot of it.
There are a few people I really like watching in interviews or give talks. But you'll find with any of that kind of content that you've watched it all after a few dozen hours max. With steamers there are hundreds to thousands of hours of content available for the person you find interesting to listen to.
I agree with this. I feel my personal viewing is much more directed these days. If I want to zombie out for a whole day it's just as likely to be a chess tournament on Twitch as anything else, and when there's nothing on I'm much quicker to give up and do something else rather than channel hop as in the old days.
What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it's mostly students and single young professionals.
Most streamers have a fixed schedule so it's not that difficult to catch them online. I'm not sure why you think it's for students and single young professionals or that you need to spend hours of time online, you can watch whenever and for however long you want.
Additionally (and anecdotally my own experience): I don't really have time to play games much anymore, but I do have time to spend 30 minutes here and there watching someone play something.
It's nice that I don't have to invest the time it takes to get up to speed to know what's going on if the commentary's good -- and it's a solid, mindless contrast to TV for me (which has been phenomenally engaging lately. it's impossible to read emails and watch house of cards, which isn't true for game streaming :D)
Sometimes I see people playing an old indie game I love and watch it for like 20~30 min. I don't want to invest in playing it again; I've already played it several times before..so with twitch I can watch someone play for a few min to burn some time.
I worked with one guy who'd keep StarCraft competitions playing in the background on his third monitor while he coded all day.
I don't mean to be rude but you are way off course about who/why people watch Twitch streams. Sure some of the Twitch viewerbase fits your description but plenty of people will tune in for a short period of time. ESPECIALLY people who don't have a lot of time because it can satisfy people's video game urges without actual investing tons of time in playing.
My hobby is making stuff, electronics, wood working stuff like that. Like gaming it's time consuming and I often don't have the time or energy. So I just watch other people doing it on YouTube a lot more than I do it myself. It's very rare for me to watch a live stream actually live though, more often than not I throw it in my "watch later" after the broadcast.
Most "normal" streams get their maximum viewer count around 2 hours into the stream. While streamers tend to have something like a waiting room for the first 10-30min of their stream.
A typical streamer which can life from it but isn't getting rich (or even wealthy!) tends to stream 6+h streams at at least 3 days a week more likely 4-5. Which additional time costs for stuff like filling taxes preparing streams, updating software etc. it's not too rare for streamers to have a 50+ hour week, without getting rich or even wealthy from it. While some pop of and get wealthy or rich it's not the norm. Most do so because they love what they are doing and/or would have problems with other jobs.
I have seen multiple cases of small streamers using Twitch as a form a therapy to help them to overcome social awkwardness or some kinds of anxiety. Also some cases of depressive or otherwise sick people using it to have something like a job even through they are to sick to get any normal job even if they didn't need it for money (to avoid brain rot of being stuck at home and maybe some additional semi-social contacts).
Naturally there are exceptions e.g. of streamers "capturing some whales" and making quite good money with a fraction of the effort of the normal case, but in the end this are exceptions.
I watch streamers every now and then, I mostly watched starcraft 2 and mostly watched during a time I played a lot. I played fairly competitively and committing to a ladder match is committing to anywhere from 5m to 1h. Playing a sc2 match is extremely demanding, if I wanted to engage with the game and make dinner at the same time the only option is to watch a stream. If I wanted to clean my room and engage with it, only option is stream. If a friend was coming over and I'd need to stop engaging with the game I'd be hesitant to start a match that could last an hour.
Not to mention I wouldn't play if I was out of it in any way (sick, drunk, tired etc)
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