Oh Twitch, how you vex us so...
Ever since November, a number of users question what is really going on behind the scenes at Twitch.tv. Right now, from Riot Games streaming League of Legends, to other MLG-style games such as Starcraft 2, DOTA 2, and the sudden new 'social experiment' (or perhaps blatant money grab) the Pokemon chaos stream, Twitch is to streaming what World of Warcraft is to MMOs.
But, unlike World of Warcraft, which got most of its growing pains done early in release, Twitch seems to be having immense problems with scaling their operations to this new influx of people interested in watching video game streams.
Take for instance, Twitch's chat system. It seems since before the beginning of the year, 'broke' is the only way to describe it. Missing messages, inaccurate follower counts, simple bots causing 8 hour chat bans, and a host of other issues plague the system. It has only gotten worse since the TwitchPlaysPokemon stream took over. The amount of input from just that channel seems to have bogged the system to a state of frozen for all the smaller streamers on Twitch. Being a system administrator, my speculation is the use of virtual servers through a non-VMware system. The signs on Twitch user channels other than the big couple of channels looks to be freezes due to contention - bigger channels eat up the resources, thus denying them to the smaller channels. This causes packet drops in the chat system, causing freezes and lost data.
Then, the added stream delay put in by Twitch to make things smoother on mobile devices has disrupted the natural flow of conversation between streamer and watchers. Thirty seconds or more delays are not uncommon. Smaller streamers, though they may not generate the traffic and revenue for Twitch, are the lifeblood of streaming. A smaller streamer can find a niche and become a large streamer overnight. But, it becomes nearly impossible for the smaller streamer to do so in such an environment unless it is done through another medium (ie, YouTube video highlights).
Alternatives in the past to Twitch have ended up failing, due to lack of funding or poor programming. It's a similar situation to World of Warcraft, how it buried a lot of smaller MMO attempts with sheer size.
But, like World of Warcraft, other streaming services are starting to catch hold. Vaughnsoft's Instagib.tv, Hitbox.tv, and others are starting to make headway and traction. This is especially true of the smaller streamers I mentioned above. For Twitch, this should be a concern as its base is eroded away due to all the problems.
For a company making multimillion dollars a year at this stage, one wonders if Twitch is being managed like 38 Studios was in Rhode Island, with the executives taking huge salaries and bonuses and the company not expanding and using its resources to keep up with demand. I hope this is not the case, but the lack of progress fixing chat and the delays and buffering of the smaller streams continuing to not be resolved makes one wonder.
It all ends up questioning if Twitch.tv grew up too fast.