The Twitch phenomenon just keeps growing. This video streaming platform focuses on gaming and so-called E-Sports, that is, professional players at the highest levels of international competitions. Thanks to this tool you can view and comment in real time on games being played by other people. Recently its Android app has been updated with improvements to viewing.
Once you have been registered for free, you can view other people’s videos—both live and recorded—as well as broadcast your own games online using an external program like Open Broadcaster Software. The really interesting thing is that, besides viewing video streams, you can make comments in a chat room associated with each stream.
The Android version has practically the same features as the web client, allowing you to browse genre channels for each game as well as consult your friends list and check whether they’re broadcasting anything live.
The latest version launched includes improvements in full-screen streaming and the transition between that and windows streaming with chat. Now, besides having a button to alternate from one view to the other, you can jump between them just by turning the device: if you hold it horizontally you’ll see the video in fullscreen, and vertically you’ll have the video in the upper part of the screen and the chat below it.
Although Twitch has been in operation since 2011, with the increasing surge in videoblogging, the craziness unleashed by free-to-play games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends and much-discussed developments like the Pokémon mass multiplayer game from the Twitch platform—all of this has made Twitch into a giant that continues to grow, as a few statistics make clear: During the month of February, it was the 4th-highest page in the United States in terms of traffic, even beating out heavyweights such as Facebook.
