Twitch COO Kevin Lin revealed that they are looking at bringing the streaming service PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS, though it won’t be without its challenges:
On mobile we just released our first in-game integration, with Asphalt 8 from Gameloft. For now, we’re going to be doing that game by game.
Handhelds – that’s something we’d love to do. On handhelds it’s more of a server/CPU concern, but we definitely want to do it. We want to build viewing apps, that’s much less CPU intensive than broadcasting.
Of course, integration with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is Twitch’s “main expansion” right now, with that console integration helping “tremendously in terms of getting people broadcasting and also viewing.”
Lin continued:
Historically it’s been really tough to stream console and mobile games. PC has always been easy because you’re just setting up the software. To broadcast console you had to buy a capture card and cabling, then configure all your software. It was very tedious.
Now each of those consoles represents about 20 per cent of overall broadcasters. There’s about 250,000 unique broadcasters per month from each. We’re pretty excited about those growth opportunities.
E-sports continues to grow. It’s something we love and support, we’d like to see it expand, to have bigger events, more pros streaming. But really, it’s the mid and longtail content that the average streamer is broadcasting. People who are essentially streaming to their friends or looking to meet new friends. Players just hanging out. That’s growing very quickly and console is a big part of that.
While Twitch is an important part of the PS4 and Xbox One, getting the service onto consoles wasn’t a breeze, with Lin saying, “What we basically had to show them was that this is something real, this is something that people wanted. We had to prove that this is more than just watching people, that it’s really about engagement. How to build an experience that lets people engage with your game when they’re not playing it – albeit in ‘passive’ yet still social way.”
