Twitch has been one of the platforms that has recorded the best numbers in terms of active users for years now, but recently the US giant is further broadening its range of action, moving from a platform specialized in the world of game streaming to a broadcaster. What is really happening and what should we expect in the future? Could Twitch become a portal where sports entertainment reigns supreme? These are the questions we will try to answer today, announcing right now that a real revolution can be glimpsed on the horizon.
Will Twitch be the TV of the future?
In recent years, as mentioned, Twitch has undergone continuous evolution, going from a platform dedicated exclusively to game streaming to a portal capable of hosting every form of entertainment. This has obviously allowed the US company to enormously broaden its range of action and attract an increasingly larger portion of users. One of the first sports, or e-sports if you prefer, to have been able to fully exploit the potential of Twitch was poker which, thanks to the US platform, managed to experience a second golden age after the one experienced at the turn of the 90s and 2000. At the time it was television that favored the success of poker at an international level, while today it is Twitch that drives this e-sport with dozens of matches and tournaments between the best players in the world that are broadcast live every day. In the wake of what poker has done, other sports such as football and F1 have also landed on Twitch, with various talk shows and dedicated entertainment broadcasts: a real revolution that is also leading television broadcasters to look for alternative solutions to stem its hemorrhage of users.
The new frontier of sport is online
For years, streaming and internet broadcasts have elided the enormous power that digital and satellite television had acquired in previous decades. The first broadcaster to explore this field in the sports field was Dazn which, despite the heavy initial criticism – often also justified by an inadequate service – was able to improve the quality enormously to the point of acquiring a position of substantial monopoly within the panorama Italian football. Dazn must be recognized for having understood the trends of the moment before others and for having been able to fully exploit the potential of the internet, leading the way within a world still rooted in tradition. In the wake of Dazn, Amazon Prime Video also decided to explore this universe with the acquisition of the exclusive rights to a weekly UEFA Champions League match and the response from users was excellent. More recently, an extremely interesting experience in the football panorama was that of Cronache di Spogliatoio which, starting as an Instagram page, gradually expanded its range of action until it acquired the rights to the Spanish Copa del Rey and of the Spanish Super Cup using YouTube as the dissemination portal. Here too, against the predictions of the most sceptical, the results were surprising and the live broadcasts kept tens of thousands of viewers glued to the screen, with peaks exceeding 150,000.
We are talking about the simple perception of very important numbers, also considering the fact that in Italy it was the first time that an event of this magnitude was broadcast exclusively on YouTube. The feeling, however, is that especially younger people are already used to this new way of understanding sport and sports entertainment in general and that in the near future we will increasingly witness a migration from digital to streaming via the internet. Twitch at the moment seems to be the main candidate to welcome this transition, but recent years have left us with the certainty that things change rapidly and that at any moment a new reality capable of revolutionizing the market could appear on the market .
2024-03-19 11:38:00
#future #sports #entertainment #Twitch
