E-sports competition driving live OTT broadcasting

Given how much traffic it draws — to say nothing of suitors — it was inevitable that Twitch.tv would attract competitors. And now it has. Paris-based Dailymotion on Wednesday announced the launch of Dailymotion Games, a new live-streaming platform dedicated to gaming (h/t VentureBeat).

According to the press release, gaming content already generates more than 180 million video views per month for Dailymotion, and according to comScore, and attracts more than 11 million unique visitors per month globally. With the new  platform,  broadcasters will be able to “create live streams, monitor them through a dedicated control panel and monetize their content via user-controlled video advertisements.”

The platform also incorporates a chat system  to allow for real-time conversations between live streamers and viewers.

Though no slouch, Dailymotion has set itself a major challenge going up again Twitch and the financial resources of its parent company, Amazon. But the competition seems already to have gotten Twitch’s attention. The day before Dailymotion issued its press release announcing Games, Twitch unveiled its new Partner Spotlight program meant to help boost the profiles — and ideally monetization proprospects — of selected partner broadcasters.

“With over a million broadcasters streaming on Twitch, we will be hard at work finding the hidden gems and rising stars that we think could best retain some of the growth that this increase in exposure would bring,” Twitch content marketing coordinator Brandon Ewing wrote in a blog post.

“Our Partnerships team looks at stats like chat activity, follower retention during spikes/raids, frequency and consistency of broadcasts, and a bunch of other behind the scenes stats before making their recommendation. The best advice we can give is just to keep putting on the best possible broadcast experience for your followers and let the rest flow from there.”

While anyone can broadcast their game-play on Twitch, only officially designated partners are able to generate revenue from their efforts, through the platform’s advertising revenue-sharing program. With another major platform coming online competition for the most popular broadcasters — and the traffic they draw — is likely to arise, putting a premium on keeping the top talent happy. Thus, the new Partner Spotlight program.

While traditional sports have played a major role in the development of live, OTT streaming, those efforts remain silo’d to their particular sports (with the notable exception of MLB Advanced Media) and have followed the traditional broadcast model of a single rights owner broadcasting to a mass audience. While Dailymotion Games and Twitch are both focused on gaming, they’re built on the model of user-generated content platforms. As competition between them (and potentially others) heats up it could begin to steer the development of the live OTT space in a different, more open direction.