Legend has it that back in the nineties, the first streamers appeared, earning money on donates. Legend has it that low-quality Chinese famclones had good enough RF signal amplifiers to show on TV sets that had no overseas composite inputs. With a little luck, this signal could be picked up in neighboring apartments, where children deprived of their cancerous friendship with the “Gray Elephant” lived, and they were willing to donate their chips, stickers and other barter items to the Streamer, in exchange for a fleeting opportunity to at least look at the cherished games.

However, moving away from the kolkhoz romance, the actual first mass stream of a video game was the Danish troll Hugo (Hugo), known to us as Kuzya, back in 1987. Against a tangible $200 for the Nintendo Entertaiment System, the TV game offered relatively budget-friendly entertainment.

Not everyone could afford to buy a game console or a powerful PC, as well as the game itself. Not everyone had enough skills to open the game secrets or banal to pass the level without dozens of respawns. Just not everyone wanted to personally familiarize themselves with this or that cycle of games, but at the same time wished to be aware of the events behind the scenes. After all, almost everyone is familiar with the spirit of the “fan” when watching your favorite sports team play. As a result, all of this was sooner or later to take on a new form that would be convenient for most viewers, so it was only a matter of technology.

On April 23, 2005, the first video “Me at the Zoo” was uploaded to YouTube, and with it the rapid growth of the future media giant began. And although at first the site was filled with “funny kittens” and other attributes of the World Wide Web, after a while users began to share recordings of the passage of their favorite games. However, the starting point of the madness is April 29, 2010. A Swede named Felix Arvid Ulf, creates his own channel, where after a while begins to share its own gameplay records, accompanying them with extremely emotional comments in the background. Two years later, more than a million subscribers watched his antics, tossing an extra coin into his e-wallet every now and then, to continue this madness.

It is hard to say that it was PewDiePie that created such a genre as Let’s Play, but it was it that became the brightest catalyst to the popularity of such entertainment. Some people watched them for the sake of simple fun, some got attached to individual players and their charisma, and some followed the development of stories created by the authors in sandboxes like Minecraft. By the way, the latter also fueled the fire, but the history and influence of this game is very extensive and claims to be a separate article, so I will limit myself to the main points. Many people liked to collect designers, but the parts are not enough, then the space for assembly, and here Minecraft was devoid of these deficiencies, giving the player a huge scope for creativity. Not surprisingly, its simplicity and variability appealed to players and gamers alike.

One way or another, technology evolved and major entertainment portals began to gradually introduce live streaming on their pages. Of course Google could not stand aside and on June 15, 2011, the search giant launched its social network Google+, which was to unite users like Facebook did before, but the emphasis was not on people, but on the content that they consume and create. From the very first announcements, audio and video calls were announced, both from the browser and via mobile apps, and free of charge, with the service constantly evolving. YouTube partners were offered an opportunity to broadcast live from the social network directly into their channel, which was supposed to be a good impetus for development in a new niche. But the “corporation of goodness” miscalculated in those moments, on which its future direct competitor was able to play successfully.

At first glance, the idea of Google was brilliant, because every owner of GMail automatically became a member of a huge community, but the abundance of a variety of services, coupled with a cumbersome and unintuitive interface, discouraged users from delving into the complex structure of the new social network, and for many of its intrusiveness and even caused a persistent aversion. At the same time, the brainchild of Amazon decided to take an alternative route, creating a service solely for streaming games. YouTube was too all-encompassing and all kinds of cats, TV shows, and beauty blogs could no longer live together peacefully, but on Twitch, users could fully enjoy only tinsel-free games.

But why was Twitch able to become a near monopoly in the gaming streaming niche? Despite its monstrous interface and piles of restrictions, Twitch was a kind of autonomous republic on the Internet. It was the limited gaming themes that allowed the service to occupy a key position in the new market, noticeably ahead of all possible competitors and it still has to prove its position to the world. Same Google tried to protect the community of gamers from the rest of the world, creating a portal YouTube Gaming, Valve without unnecessary announcements added the ability to broadcast directly from Steam, and the consoles of recent generations as actively implement broadcast functions Share Play, allowing not only to watch a broadcast friends, but at any time to join the game. However, for the average viewer it was more important to just go to the site or mobile application, click on the game and choose a streamer to your liking.

However, while YouTube showed ads on its pages, a percentage of which went to the authors of the videos, monetization on Twitch was much more complicated. While Google encouraged creators and, as their popularity grew, introduced new technological improvements for free, the brainchild of Amazon, on the contrary, forced the streamers themselves to pay for the inclusion of certain features. Not only that, but there were never any ads embedded on its pages, and the community itself began to offer its creators incentives in the form of regular donations during the broadcast. Later appeared the possibility to buy paid emoticons for the chat, paid subscriptions, paid mentions of the donator during the streams and other options to siphon money from the audience. And what’s amazing – everyone was happy with it! Over time, there was paid advertising in broadcasts, sponsored equipment, flashed in the frame and in the description, and from April 5, 2017 right while watching the broadcast, there was an opportunity to buy the same game through the internal store. As a result, about 250,000 viewers enter Twitch every month to watch someone else’s game, while the overall figure for YouTube is somewhere around 75,000 streamers per month.