Amazon’s Twitch launches TikTok rival amid push to ban the Chinese app, boosting competition in short-form video
- Twitch, the live-streaming platform known for video game content, has launched Discovery Feed, allowing users to scroll through short clips from longer videos
- A recently passed law in the US is seeking to force China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in the country
Creators on Twitch typically live-stream themselves playing video games or chatting with audiences, sometimes for up to eight hours at a time. The new service, called Discovery Feed, allows viewers to scroll through short clips taken from those longer videos. It appears as a new tab on Twitch’s mobile app.
Discovery Feed has a ways to go before becoming a significant rival to TikTok. Early posts viewed by Bloomberg included an Arizona State University professor welcoming students to class and a streamer getting attacked on the street.
ByteDance earns praise from Chinese social media for denying TikTok sale
Unlike TikTok, Twitch creators generally don’t upload their own short-form content. Instead users pick out funny or entertaining segments from creators’ live streams and turn them into clips.
The Discovery Feed will be “personalised based on a viewer’s watch history and real-time interactions”, a Twitch spokesperson said.
That will potentially include mature content, provided it meets Twitch’s guidelines, the spokesperson said.
Twitch and TikTok have been taking pages from each other’s playbooks for years. In 2022, TikTok launched a live subscription option, which was reminiscent of Twitch’s offering. TikTok’s live-streaming product has not put much of a dent in Twitch’s market share, however.
Streamers won’t receive a cut of the ad revenue that appears on Discovery Feed because the commercials appear between their clips and not directly in them, according to a Twitch spokesperson.
