Last week, the United States just passed a bill targeting TikTok. On Tuesday, April 30th, Amazon’s subsidiary live streaming platform Twitch also announced the official launch of its own short video feature, “Discovery Feed,” to compete with TikTok.
Twitch is a global leading video platform and gaming community where creators typically livestream themselves playing video games and engaging with viewers, sometimes for as long as 8 hours.
The new service called “Discovery Feed” allows viewers to browse short clips extracted from these long videos. It enables users to discover new streamers, thereby increasing user engagement.
However, before Discovery Feed can become a major competitor to TikTok, there is still some way to go.
Unlike TikTok, Twitch creators generally do not upload short videos. Instead, users select interesting or entertaining segments from creators’ livestreams and turn them into short clips.
A Twitch spokesperson stated that Discovery Feed will be personalized based on viewers’ watch history and real-time interactions.
TikTok, a division of Chinese company ByteDance, has 170 million monthly users in the United States. Due to concerns about the Chinese Communist Party potentially using TikTok for propaganda or monitoring American citizens, the U.S. Congress and the Biden administration are pressuring ByteDance to divest from TikTok, or else face a ban.
Over the years, Twitch and TikTok have been learning from each other’s practices.
In 2022, TikTok introduced a live subscription option, reminiscent of Twitch’s service. However, TikTok’s live product has not significantly impacted Twitch’s market share.
According to a Twitch spokesperson, streamers will not receive a share of the advertising revenue that appears on Discovery Feed because the ads appear between their videos and not directly within the videos.