• This isn’t surprising in the least. They’ve been pushing more and more ads recently; trying to get streamers to run them more often. I hate ads, so I have always opted for a short pre-roll so that when its done, viewers won’t have to worry about ads anymore. But I think Twitch will eventually force streamers to run ads every half hour, no matter how many people they scare off.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 year ago

      People don’t realise how expensive video streaming is, especially at a larger service’s scale. There’s no just way to have a fully free service with no ads (or even just minimal ads).

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        It’s not even the servers or VOD storage. It’s the bandwidth.
        Live streaming isn’t cheap. AWS have example pricing:
        https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-on-aws/cost.html

        Now, expect twitch to get a hefty discount. Even if they are paying 30% of that cost (and I’ve pulled that number out of my ass), that’s $500 per hour for a 10k viewer stream (and that’s assuming an average of 4mbps bitrate, not the source 8mbps).

        A 10k (8mbps bitrate, so 80,000mbps or 80gbps total sending - egest? - bandwidth) viewer streamer is going to be on a 70/30 split.
        So for a $5 sub, twitch is getting $1.50.
        So that’s 330 subs per hour, or 5.5 subs per minute, or 1 sub every 11 seconds to cover the bandwidth costs.

        AWS EC2 outbound bandwidth calculators align pretty closely with these costs, so it’s not like “video connections get the cheap networks” or anything.