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The Dota 2 International Championships took place last week, determining the winner of the grand Aegis of the Immortal trophy and distributing $18.4 million in prize money among the 16 participating teams. Beyond the mythical battles and skirmishes inside the game, the tournament was also an important event in the ongoing contest between YouTube and Twitch. The International 5 (TI5) was streamed live on both services as well as inside the Dota 2 game client itself — though this year, unlike any of the previous ones, I watched almost all of it on YouTube. What’s changed?
Having lost out to Amazon in the pursuit to acquire Twitch last year, Google remained determined to own a dominant live-streaming platform and redoubled its efforts at making YouTube that destination. YouTube had already served up a good number of live music concerts and political debates, but the fight against Twitch was about recruiting gamers: both fans of titles like Dota 2 and the players who streamed their matches online. This is a big and growing business, and it’s a natural extension of YouTube’s dominant position as the main repository of user-generated videos. But YouTube’s first bite at the International cherry wasn’t a happy one: in 2014, it shared the spotlight with Twitch on Valve’s Dota 2 pages, however its streams were unreliable, lapsing into regular buffering pauses, and lacked the polish and quality of Twitch’s output.
In 2015, YouTube’s live streams of The International have been pretty much flawless. 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second, always there when you need them. The gap in quality that existed has now been bridged, and YouTube stands as Twitch’s equal in pure technical terms. But you can’t beat Twitch by just being as good, and the thing that drew me to YouTube this year was the extra functionality on offer from Google’s video service.
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In short, Youtube has DVR Rewind feature that lets you watch parts of the livestreams you missed out on.
Having lost out to Amazon in the pursuit to acquire Twitch last year, Google remained determined to own a dominant live-streaming platform and redoubled its efforts at making YouTube that destination. YouTube had already served up a good number of live music concerts and political debates, but the fight against Twitch was about recruiting gamers: both fans of titles like Dota 2 and the players who streamed their matches online. This is a big and growing business, and it’s a natural extension of YouTube’s dominant position as the main repository of user-generated videos. But YouTube’s first bite at the International cherry wasn’t a happy one: in 2014, it shared the spotlight with Twitch on Valve’s Dota 2 pages, however its streams were unreliable, lapsing into regular buffering pauses, and lacked the polish and quality of Twitch’s output.
In 2015, YouTube’s live streams of The International have been pretty much flawless. 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second, always there when you need them. The gap in quality that existed has now been bridged, and YouTube stands as Twitch’s equal in pure technical terms. But you can’t beat Twitch by just being as good, and the thing that drew me to YouTube this year was the extra functionality on offer from Google’s video service.
YouTube is now better at live streaming than Twitch
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In short, Youtube has DVR Rewind feature that lets you watch parts of the livestreams you missed out on.
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