I’ve been fairly bullish on YouTube Gaming’s prospects when it came to challenging Twitch mainly due to all of the advantages Google has when it comes to video (YouTube) and search.
Now that the site is actually live though, I believe that I was way too bullish about this and that I’m actually wrong that Twitch has anything to worry about. I myself don’t stream at all but someone (a friend) does casually (and was looking forward to moving over to YouTube Gaming). Her testing over the first fews days wasn’t a very good experience though. She also had some good points about her own viewing experience.
One of her first observations was what determines what gets displayed in the Live panel on the main screen. I believe it is a live feed aggregator that lists current but not all live streams. I personally cannot say what kind of criteria and/or metrics are used though, and if what is displayed there is randomly promoted. What I do know is there are lots of more live streams going on than what is displayed here.
An easy way to see this for yourself is to search for a popular game like League of Legends, click/tap the Live link, and see how many live streams are going on. Than go back to the main page, click/tap More on the Live panel, and see how many of those streams are shown there.
Her other important point was that live streams are mixed with either previous ones or uploaded content when you are looking at specific games. I have to agree there; by default, the site and app should show all live streams first rather than showing everything that is in the Explore feed. I know doing it the way they are doing makes it look like a lot of content.
The other obvious biggie is the absence of the console streamer AND viewer; it’s what I noted before in my earlier posts regarding PS4 and Xbox One. Twitch’s rise really coincided with the launch of these two consoles with their ability to live stream and to also aggregate those console specific broadcasts for viewing on their respective platforms (PlayStation Live for example). I posted before that the PS4’s 3.0 firmware is planned to have YouTube support. The thing is that the US beta isn’t going to begin until sometime in September. I’m not sure about Microsoft’s plans with the Xbox One.
Because of this, YouTube Gaming lacks a lot of this spontaneous type of content from console gamers. But it also goes beyond this from my own viewing observation even for those streaming using something like a Game Capture HD or desktop game streaming. As mentioned before, Twitch did the right thing by contractually locking in their top streamers.
Those streamers have a viewership for a reason; it takes a lot of time to build up that kind of following. And those viewers are a captive audience. Those streaming on YouTube Gaming that are starting off fresh (not former Twitch partners as an example) will need to effectively build up to that sort of viewership. And old habits die hard (which is why the general viewer numbers on many YouTube Gaming streams are on the low side for most the popular games when compared to the same ones on Twitch).
This is also where the above mentioned Explore versus Live feed issue comes into play. When you navigate to any game tile (and that listing is sorted based on total viewers) in Twitch, it displays current live streams; really simple. With YouTube Gaming (when you select or search for a specific game), it will display everything in the Explore feed. That includes live games as well as uploaded or archived content. And this display isn’t the live streams first; it’s all mixed in with the other content using the same relevance filter that is used on the regular YouTube site. So there are times when a live stream will be at the near end of a bunch of other uploaded content or archived stream. If you want to just see the live streams, you have to select the Live feed.
And I did notice some streamers (who were testing the service out) mentioning this same thing. Seems like just a simple click or tap but I see the point given that one of its key features is the whole live stream angle. The fix for this is simple; they should just default to the Live feed (and if there aren’t any, then the default should go to Explore).
Another thing that I didn’t know is that in order to live stream, you need a verified YouTube account. This requires a mobile phone number since a code is messaged to perform the verification. So I checked into this myself and the reason stated by YouTube/Google is this step is required to prevent spam and abuse.
I’m going to be brutally frank on this one; this is going to be a no-go on the console streaming side since people are going to be signing up for an account from there, and many aren’t going to go through this verification procedure. If you sign up for a Twitch account from the PS4, it doesn’t tell you to verify your account but you can still use it. The only time that becomes a problem is if a streamer enables verified e-mail for their chat. A strictly PS4 user will never know this though and would be thus locked out from chat until they check their e-mail, and follow the verification link. But it doesn’t prevent them in anyway from streaming.
Furthermore, YouTube comments (just like Twitch chat, or any online chat for that matter) is just full of crap to begin with. As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of some of Google’s data mining techniques. All I see is that this is just another way to capture your phone number.
Going back to the streamer that I follow, one of the biggest issues she mentioned though was the archival aspect of ones live stream. I myself mentioned this was supposed to be its big advantage since what is live streamed is supposed to also be automatically turned into video on demand (VOD) content. The problem she ran into is that she let her test stream run for just a little under 7 hours but only the final 2 hours were saved as a VOD. Basically everything else was lost (I asked her to check if it had been split into multiple parts but she says there was only one video).
She mentioned that while highlighting an archive on Twitch is a pain, at least the entire stream is there no matter how many hours. So she went from someone who was initially looking forward to moving to staying put with both Twitch and Ustream. She says the site does look much nicer but all of that as well as any technical advantages doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work right on the streaming side. The way she put it was this; first impressions are lasting ones and this wasn’t a great one. I have to agree.
Update: found this article which highlighted just a SMALL number of tweets in the first 6 hours after the service launched. To be it real simple, YouTube Gaming dropped the ball big time.
