Why Some Of Our Members Are Leaving Twitch For Beam
Streamers have had their pick of streaming platforms for years now. There’s Hitbox, Azubu, Youtube Gaming, Twitch, Beam, and several more. Twitch is by far the leader in the space as far as overall traffic and brand equity is concerned, but another contender has seriously stepped up its efforts in the past few months, Beam. Our community discord is almost always buzzing with conversation and over the past month or two we’ve heard and spoken to more and more streamers that are making the switch, or at least beginning to dabble in the up and coming streaming site. We interviewed a few of our members who’ve made the switch and spent our own time on the platform to get to the bottom of it.
Beam
Started and run by Matt Salsamendi, Beam was acquired by Microsoft in August 2016, a mere 8 months after launch. That’s a week or two in startup time (It’s pretty much the opposite of dog years). Since it’s acquisition, Beam has been making some serious moves. Moves that have already lead to a little disruption. Beam leans on the pre-existing infrastructure Microsoft has and combines it with a unique way to stream. With virtually no delay between what’s happening behind the camera and what the viewers are seeing/hearing. Let’s take a look at it’s traffic before diving into why some of are members are beginning to make the switch.
Traffic
Beam hit 5 million hits to its site in March, a 108% increase from it’s traffic the month before. The growth was hit after 2–3 months of what seemed like stagnancy around the 2–3 million mark in their growth. Let’s put that in perspective. Twitch has the highest amount of traffic by far compared to other streaming platforms, sitting around 500 million hits a month on any given month. The platform fluctuates between around 480,000–550,000 but tends to stay above 500 million. It’s interesting to note that Beams 5 million hits per month in comparison don’t even make up a fraction of the monthly fluctuations in traffic that Twitch has- but could that be of benefit to streamers? Some of our teachers like Ninja have spoken about searching for games to stream with less of an audience- so it’s easier to make a dent in the market.
YT gaming slides in at 28.7 million hits per month, but has had a long series of down months where it’s seen decreasing traffic.
The last site we’ll compare is Hitbox, Hitbox seems to have more traction in European countries according to its analytics. It also appears to negatively correlate with Beam in traffic, although there’s no evidence I’ve seen to say that Beam is directly acquiring users from Hitbox. It’s still interesting to note that Hitbox was at 5 million in October and has dropped down to 2.9 million in March (almost the exact opposite of Beam).
Now that you have a better idea of what the space and its players look like, let’s dive into why some of our users are switching over to Beam.
Faster Than Light
Beam is the first platform to tout Faster Than Light (FTL) streaming. When you stream on platforms like Twitch or Hitbox, there’s always a delay of at least a few seconds.
“FTL is our brand new streaming protocol that allows for sub-second video latency when streaming. FTL enables streamers to interact with their viewers in real time, it’s specifically tailored towards streams that engage viewers with interactive controls.” — Beam.pro Blog
Having “sub-second” video latency is kind of a big deal- especially when it comes to interacting with your audience. This allows a whole new array of fan engagement options to open up while simultaneously alleviating that awkward silence between you typing out a question and a streamer answering. Beam also has an open API and gives its’ streamers/users the ability to use interactive panels. Commonly streamers will use the boards as a soundboard, where viewers can use their hard earned sparks (earned by spending time watching streams) to play sound clips that a streamer has chosen to associate with interactive buttons beneath his/her stream feed.
While it sounds simple in concept, it really does make you feel more engaged in the stream. I wonder if once Beam hits higher and higher traffic milestones, if it will get to a point where interactivity through features such as the soundboard will have to be turned off to avoid a system overload. Or if the interactivity will start stopping the streamer from being to concentrate at all. One could look to Twitch streaming Pokemon and allowing users to control Ash by crowd sourced commands as a sign that the answer to that question would be, “no”, but only time will tell.
Some streamers have even gone above and beyond to use the sub-second latency and Beams interactive channel dashboard to make their stream creative and one-of-a-kind. Sorryaboutyourcats for example. I don’t even know how to explain the cool ways this guy has been using Beam, so I’ll just link his channel (he does a much better job of explaining it). I popped into a stream once where he had several robots on the floor, and users could control the robots through the beam interface to try and pop balloons.
“When it comes down to it, Beam’s technology favors someone like myself. I stream for the interaction. I try and find unique ways to interact with people and I love looking into the developer side of things as well. Having an open API and the ability to make interactive panels + streaming in a lag-less state is amazing.” — Lucid, Dojo Member, Streamer
The Microsoft Ecosystem
Another asset that Beam has above other would-be Twitch competitors is the fact that it is owned by Microsoft. That alone shows that the platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Microsoft has the infrastructure and the ecosystem to help Beam catapult in growth. Let’s not forget what happened to Netscape when Microsoft decided to create its own web browser.
In the past month, Beam was made a native app on every Xbox One, through a new update that Microsoft pushed out. This not only means that anyone can instantly start streaming from their Xbox through the app, they can also watch other Beam streamers without having to download anything at all. This will open up a whole new market of stream viewers as people who have never watched a live stream get curious and start meandering over to the new icon on their console. At any given time there are at least 1 million X Box’s online, that’s 1 million potential new viewers Beam just added in a single move.
“The reason I moved over to Beam was the opportunity to grow under the Microsoft ecosystem. I have been with Xbox live for over 15 years and with Beam and the Microsoft integration, my channel growth has been very strong” — DzLive, streamer, LVLUP Dojo Member
Even more impressive however is the Windows “Creator” update. The new Windows update places Beam as a native app on an estimated 50 million PC’s around the world. I believe that a lot of LVLUP Dojo’s members are moving over to Beam in part due to the huge spike in traffic everyone is expecting it to see. Twitch streamers who have spent years on the platform whisper of a time when Twitch had a huge surge in traffic and several streamers when from medium sized audiences to larger than life. I think a lot of the attraction that beam has right now is the idea that the wave might be approaching for Beam. A downside to the surge in traffic is that it doesn’t seem like Beam was fully ready to handle the new wave of users. The system has been a little unstable lately and it doesn’t seem like the phone app has really reached it’s fruition- halting a lot of potential mobile users from viewing streams on the platform.
Small Pond
Besides the interactivity, less latency, and the trend in traffic increasing, our members are also switching over to Beam due to it being a smaller pond. On one hand, you can look at Twitch’s 500 million hits a month as a larger market, ripe for the taking for new streamers. On the other hand, you can also look at the 2 million active broadcasters on Twitch, and see it as a saturated market place where there isn’t much room for growth. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer here. Everyone has a certain style, certain platforms respond better to different streaming personalities, and there are infinite other variables that go into determining what platform to stream on. For example, steam games seem to be doing pretty well on Beam in the channel ranks (looking at concurrent viewers for each game), however League of Legends (typically the largest channel on Twitch) is nearly non existent on Beam.
“I’m literally the only constant fighting game player on Beam so an entire genre of games was open for me being about the only person streaming them. Simply put, Beam has too much potential to ignore.” — Lucid
Another benefit to Beam being a smaller pond, is the community that’s come up around it. Many of our users have found that other Beam streamers are more open and welcoming than other streamers they’ve gotten into contact with on Twitch. Perhaps it’s because of how young the platform is, but our users have found a lot of support from the already established streamers on Beam.
“The Beam community is super supportive of new streamers, on my first night of streaming I was hosted by LenaAxios for over 100 viewers! Not only did I gain followers from the host, I gained regular viewers who still come back to my stream. Another partnered Beam streamer, Archonaut, hosted me as well. He’s now a regular in my streams, and shouts me out on his streams quite frequently. All in all, the community on Beam has been amazing in the short time I’ve spent on the site.” TheAltGamer, streamer, LVLUP Dojo Member
TheAltGamer, a variety streamer and Dojo Member, has seen huge success in his short time on Beam. He’s only been using the platform for a little less than a month and has attained over 600 followers — more than he reached on Twitch in years.
Only time will tell who ends up winning the battle to be the #1 streaming platform, for now Twitch is still the leader by a landslide. LVLUP Dojo is a Twitch partner, and we definitely won’t be leaving the platform anytime soon. Twitch has gotten it’s place in the market by being the best in its class, there’s no denying that. However, it might be possible that Beam could giving them a run for the money by changing the elements of the class itself?
LVLUP Dojo Courses
Build a Following — Live Streaming — Tyler “Ninja” Blevins
The Daily Routine — Content Creation — FaZe Apex
Leadership in eSports — eSports/FPS — FaZe Clayster
Building a Team — eSports/FPS — OpTic Scump
Manipulating the Meta — eSports/FG — Justin Wong
