Twitch Aces YouTube Again
June 21, 2019
I did a quick check of YouTube Live, the finder for live streams available on YouTube. You can locate this dashboard at this link. I scrolled through the results on YouTube at 0630 US Eastern time. I located this video link on the YouTube Live page:
YouTube Live has zero Hong Kong protest streams which are actually “live.” Queries run at 0630 am US Eastern time.
The “Police HQ Blocked” points to a “recent live stream.” That’s okay but the link appears on the YouTube Live page, and there is no live stream of the Hong Kong protest streaming live.
What? A live index pointing to an archived file.
Now contrast that with Twitch.tv, an Amazon property. I entered the query “Hong Kong protest” in the Twitch search box at this link: https://bit.ly/2sRPekp and got hits to actual live streams. Here’s a screen shot taken shortly after my visit to the YouTube Live page.
A Twitch live stream captured about 630 am US Eastern time.
The quality of the video is excellent. None of that low res stuff.
A couple of observations:
- YouTube Live is supposed to provide links to live content. Obviously YouTube does not have live video of the historic Hong Kong protests on June 21, 2019, US time zone, or YouTube chooses not to make these streams available
- Twitch.tv provides live streams of high quality from different Twitch content providers and the Twitch.tv search engine makes the content easy to find. This is a feat that mainstream US media sites cannot achieve.
- The cognitive disconnect of YouTube Live’s listing archived footage as “live” is baffling to me.
Net net: Amazon Twitch continues to provide interesting and often significant content of news value. YouTube looks increasingly arthritic when compared to the more agile Twitch service. Plus Twitch delivers high quality streams. To be fair, Amazon does display some annoying and repetitive advertisements. That’s a small price to pay for feet on the street information about activities in Hong Kong.
Twitch is focused and apparently on the steraming ball. Google is not in the game when it comes to Hong Kong’s protests.
If you were Hong Kong government authorities, which service would you use to track protest activities? Sure, the government’s camera network is a first choice, but right behind might be the Twitch.tv service. YouTube? Probably not.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2019
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One Response to “Twitch Aces YouTube Again”
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Well… consider yourself added to my blogroll. I have like six other blogs I read on a weekly basis, guess that number just increased to seven! Keep writing!