[ayberk]

I'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself.

This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tournaments to move to a better platform.

[DoesntMatter22]

I watch starcraft on twitch but can never watch it live. It'll get to a crucial moment and then a 3 minute commercial interrupts. Literally the game is over at that point. No point to watch.

They'd have done better with some sort of integrated commercials or banner bar or something else.

Or even just buffering those 3 minutes. So I do watch on twitch but I wait till the match is over.

What also sucks about twitch is you can't rewind. So many problems there

[KennyBlanken]

Twitch allows streamers quite a bit of control over when and how ads run, including manually triggering them. As long as they run a certain number of ads per hour, you don't see a preroll.

The streamer you were watching didn't bother to reduce ads to short 15 second chunks or run them manually during slow points like sitting in-queue.

[k12sosse]

If you load the VOD while they're still live, you can pause in place and rewind. YouTube does it natively in the live broadcast, but Twitch being Twitch just isn't incentivized to make it on the actual live stream, probably because money.

[belltaco]

You can sub to the channel or get Twitch Turbo to remove ads. One sub is free if you have Amazon Prime.

[DoesntMatter22]

If I have to pay then I might as well wait for the vod

[jpalawaga]

Ads are controlled by the streamers. They can do prerolls if they desire, or you can at least control whether or not if they're running by rollings ads mid-stream.

And apple tv app isn't abandoned, I use it every day.

that being said, you're not compeltely off-base, some streamers are now simulcasting on youtube , presumable to mitigate some of this.

[Fabricio20]

This is not entirely true, at least not anymore. Twitch forces ads every two hours? or so nowadays (some predefined amount of time), even if the streamer has ads disabled entirely. I believe it's either that or preroll ads? Don't quote me on this but I've seen it happen and explained like that by more than one streamer.

Prerolls in particular are super annoying to the point that I've moved on to twitch turbo, even though I have a subscription to the vast majority of the creators I watch regularly. Just opening a stream of some other creator to see quickly what is going on and just getting slammed with a 30s+ AD is not a good experience.

In fairness to twitch though, they do cover all the bandwidth usage from all these streamers, including the ones which don't even qualify for partnership and ad revenue. I'm just glad they offer the option to pay to get rid of these things.

[squeaky-clean]

It's not that twitch forces ads every 2 hours or at random intervals. The streamer has a control on their dashboard to trigger to trigger X seconds of ads. If you don't run the minimum amount of ads in a 2 hour window, Twitch WILL take over control of the ads. But if you stay on top of things you can entirely control when ads occur so they don't happen in the middle of an eSports match.

It's either that or pre-roll ads like you said.

[itsTyrion]

that 6 mbps for every viewer ain't paying for itself