[mcny]

It was just five or six years ago when my friends and I found Twitch website unbearable. We'd always watch twitch on vlc using live streamer http://docs.livestreamer.io/

Today, we have YouTube Live and to a much smaller extent mixer. More importantly, I'm not afraid to open Twitch on a desktop web browser. What changed? The main change is reliable 60fps streaming.

If Facebook can't do 60fps on day one, it might as well not try.

I remember asking Justin tv engineers whether they thought they could break even. They said it is more than enough to show one thirty second ad every hour (as far as I remember) to keep the lights on. But then this was before Twitch partner programs. Also we were streaming from potato quality laptop webcams. Watching 240p video with 20 second latency was an ordinary miracle.

I imagine the costs are likely much higher today. But I'm curious. Did Facebook spend a billion dollars on content deals?