Twitch

Responding to listener feedback — that the hosts agree too much and pitch softballs — episode 3 picks a more recent, spicier deal: Twitch, acquired in 2014 and recorded in November 2015, with lots of open questions. People are generally positive and optimistic and the market is exploding, but "a whole lot to talk about."

About 14 months before recording, acquisition rumors swirled around a three-year-old live-streaming network primarily used for streaming games: Twitch.TV — itself with a crazy history. Chapter one: Justin.TV, one of the early Y Combinator companies (around 2007). Before smartphones got big, before GoPro and all that, Justin Kan strapped a camera to himself and broadcast what he was doing 24/7 through Y Combinator. It's hard to overstate how crazy that was in 2007 — pre-iPhone or right when the first iPhone came out. YouTube was out there, but that was recorded video; live was a crazy concept. And ultimately it didn't work — even once it became a platform where anyone could stream anything, with competitors like Ustream. It was the era of classic build-the-platform-before-the-use-case: platforms for people to stream whatever they wanted, incredible piracy, a whole bunch of seedy stuff — and no clear winner for what live streaming was for.

Instagram (covered last episode) had happened — not yet acquired by Facebook — and Justin.TV was still kicking along. They pivoted, spinning out a company called SocialCam. Ben remembers its launch marketing at South by Southwest. Super cool concept — in parallel with Justin.TV still running, some employees having left or still under the same umbrella. SocialCam was "Instagram for video" — in quotes — not a thing, or at least not at that point; but a great idea with a nugget in it, and one of the best-designed consumer apps of that era: a killer team behind it, touching a very human nerve. But like Justin.TV, never wide consumer adoption — its wide adoption came in the "Facebook steroid era," like baseball's 90s steroid era: pre-IPO Facebook, when anyone who could leverage the Facebook graph for mobile and web adoption did. "Were they one of those companies? They were one of those borrow-the-graph companies — stole the graph." SocialCam spun out of Justin.TV in 2011 and was acquired less than a year later — by Autodesk, for $60 million. (Crazy Vidi did the same thing and petered out.)

For non-gamers: the hosts looked into the name, which has a certain feel — the site is purple, with a gamer vibe, attracting the pro-gamer archetype. "Twitch gameplay" refers to games where you have to move the mouse around the screen very quickly — a first-person shooter snapping from one target to the next: touch and finesse and very fast physical actions, rather than a slower strategy game. Twitch was a dedicated streaming platform for streaming yourself playing video games.

The context: some listeners today understand how big Twitch is and how big the sports universe is — games becoming services and products that live on and develop huge audiences. Before this era, games were packaged software you bought on a disc, stuck in your console or PC, played alone for maybe 100 hours, beat, done. From this time, games started becoming living, breathing services — World of Warcraft the first example — a model that has revolutionized the whole industry: games living on and on as experiences, the weekly reset (incredible to watch), Hearthstone's monthly journeys, year one, year two — a whole different model.

"It's so funny thinking about the old ones: if you'd have told me in 2009 that a company would be acquired for a billion dollars that lets people watch other people play video games, I'd call you crazy." Like being told in 2007 that a company with a dozen-ish employees making an app for this smartphone would be acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012 — you'd have thought they were crazy.