Join Manuel and David as they talk about the Future of Livestreaming: The Most Important Battleground No One is Talking About. And how will livestreaming shape the future of social commerce?

Listen now on your favorite podcast platform:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | Overcast

The battles to own the platforms and audiences of the future are never ending, but one of the most important but least talked about is the battle for user generated live stream content.

With Twitch boasting impressive viewer numbers – 18.5 million daily active viewers for a total of 10.6 billion hours of content watched in 2019 – it simply cannot be ignored. But what is particularly relevant to the debate right now is that platforms like Twitch are moving away from being solely focused on gaming. For Twitch itself, of more interest is the broadcast of live sporting events itself.

“We’ve identified, basketball, football, and motor sport as three particularly important sports. We think there is a strong adjacency between our existing audience, and the traditional audience for those sports” says Twitch’s EMEA Sports Lead Charlie Beall.

One of the big appeals of Twitch is its demographics. It’s young: 72 percent of its audience is under 34, with 26 percent aged between 13 and 17.

That audience is also engaged. While current go-to App TikTok is all about hooking people with short 10-second clips, Twitch it at the other end of the spectrum with long viewership times.

“A regular twitch viewer spends 90 minutes a day on the platform, which is an enormous amount of time,” says Beall.

An then comes the eCommerce component.  Amazon is an incredibly strong platform, their biggest weakness is that they do not have any plays in social commerce, which will take over eCommerce in the coming years. Twitch is their golden ticket to change that, but they need to make changes to platform in order for it to become a part of the mainstream.

The biggest chasm Twitch is currently trying to cross is erasing the stigma of being a video game streaming platform to being a anything streaming platform, which they are doing.

If Twitch can grow beyond gaming and into being ‘the’ streaming platform in the age of social commerce, fully connected to Amazon’s back end infrastructure fro fulfillment and payments, the sky’s the limit for what the platform can be.

What do you think?  Take a listen and let us know your thoughts.

Want more?

Subscribe to The Edge eComm Digest and receive weekly news directly in your INBOX >

Check our other stuff out too:

This episode is brought to you by MGR Agency. Scaling marketing for leading digital brands.

If you liked this episode, please share it with your friends.  If you REALLY liked it, please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.  Thank you for watching or listening!