Comment by wesleytodd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wesleytodd | Hacker News Reader

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Fully acknowledging that some of the things they have issues with, my startup also has issues with, BUT:

My startup is under 2 years old, in the same space, and with a much smaller team. We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces, and even released many other features that Twitch is only now also working on.

We have regularly looked at this market and what keeps fueling twitch's success, and strictly speaking people go where the content is. It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech. If there are 500 people streaming the game you want to watch on twitch and 10 on another platform, the viewers stay on twitch.

Anyway, it is an interesting problem, and one that all competitors in this space are facing. And has clearly not pushed twitch out in any way.

Finally the self promotion if anyone is interested in our product: https://www.stream.me

>>> It has NOTHING to do with the user experience of the product, nothing to do with the quality of the tech.

Good UX is a bonus, can be useful for growth, competing with other products once the content is on a similar level, etc. However, yes, the content is the key, yes. People come for the content, not for some extra feature (and extra features often affect only a small percentage of the users).

> We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces

A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience.

My point is, you haven't solved Twitch's problems at Twitch's scale.

Very true, that is a continual problem that even twitch hopefully has to address often. There are no simple answers as you scale an application. I was more addressing the feature set.

All a team can really do is setup an architecture that can theoretically scale, and then adjust as you reach higher and higher levels.

FWIW, our site is actually a pivot after a product that reached a higher unique per day than twitch currently has (99th globally vs 63rd globally according to alexa.com). And I can say from experience that scaling a real-time experience is MUCH harder than a more traditional web app experience. But the techniques are much the same, reach the scale, see what breaks, fix.

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