Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events
I think it&#x27;s very important for Twitch to do this, and I think they need to do it more, to be honest. Let me tell you a story.<p>I am a big Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fan. I play a bit, but I vastly prefer to watch professional play. I got into the game a year ago or so, and that seemed to be a glorious time to spectate the game. Streams were virtually exclusively on Twitch, and every weekend it felt like there was a ($100k+ prize pool) tournament, and every week there were high quality pick-up&#x2F;practice games between professional players being streamed.<p>Of course (who can blame them?), YouTube Gaming wanted a piece of this pie. They cut some exclusive deals with a couple online leagues and tournament organizer, bringing a sizable chunk of the content with them to YouTube Gaming.<p>However, the users DID NOT follow (and UX over on YT can be almost entirely blamed), and the ensuing fracturing of the community has seen CS:GO drop from consistently top 5 in Twitch games to regularly outside the top 10. The thing is, though, the missing viewership mostly didn&#x27;t migrate to YouTube, instead just deciding to not watch at all. The appeal behind Twitch and CS:GO was that there was basically non-stop _very high_ quality content being streamed, and you didn&#x27;t need to put in a single ounce of effort to find it. YouTube very much does not have that same user flow down, at all.<p>And now (even though the position isn&#x27;t particularly degraded), owing to the relative difficulty of finding tournaments on YouTube OR Twitch, I find myself watching a lot less. So goes the general vibe of the community. Sure, woe is us, 2 whole sources? But consider this: YouTube&#x27;s discoverability is horrible, its UI plagued with reruns emblazoned with a red &quot;LIVE NOW&quot; that screams for your attention at first and later leaves you unwilling to trust any visuals on the site; Twitch, on the other hand, with its inability to pause &#x2F; rewind &#x2F; stream a smooth 1080p60 (hell, even 720p60 stutters 10x as much as YouTube&#x27;s) leaves you comparatively upset about video quality when you watch there.<p>So I guess my point is that Twitch clearly loses in the tech department to YouTube, but its benefits (more entertaining chat, better discoverability and UI&#x2F;UX) are more than enough to make you a dedicated user when exclusivity is part of that package. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see which side can overcome its issues to gain the advantage.<p>Note: edits for readability have occurred over the 5 minutes following the posting of this comment