I'm very surprised that MS has quit this quickly. I didn't expect them to win in the short-term against Twitch and I doubt they did either. This suggests that Mixer didn't just do poorly (which could have been assumed) but it must have been a deep catastrophe that showed no signs of turning around.
I think the problem with video, and the monopolies it continues to create, is the massive expense of data transfer. I'm guessing Mixer had hundreds/thousands of streamers active at any given time. I assume this was a massive cost and the revenue to support it (even ignoring their deals with streamers like Ninja/Shroud) just wasn't there.
It makes me doubt the profitability of Twitch, although you can be sure they are breathing a sigh of relief today.
I think your analysis is dead on, the only thing I'm surprised by is that Facebook has some sort of FB Gaming streaming platform. I don't really use Facebook, but I watch a fair number of twitch streamers and let's plays and whatnot on YouTube and I've never once heard anyone mention FB Gaming.
A year or two ago FB partnered with a Counter-Strike tournament organizer (ESL) for exclusive streaming rights, and that was probably the most high profile partnership I've ever seen associated with it.
It definitely did not go well for them, though; the community were not fans and they promptly went back to Twitch after their year was up. They had to have paid a pretty penny to get that deal inked!
Thing is, Facebook is just forcing views by showing a live stream on people's feed. This alone makes it grow exponentially. It also solves the biggest problem Twitch has at the moment: not being able to promote lesser known streamers. I've see plenty of unknown people streaming on Facebook with 100+ viewers. This is actually good for streamers.
> I don't see how Farmville is relevant. Mobile games and Twitch streams don't see to be anything alike.
Exactly. FB Gaming seems to be very focused on Mobile Games and other typical Facebook-Games (makes sense), not so much on Console and PC-Games.
Considering the culture of users it also makes sense. Facebook is more for casual games, who play something on the side, but don't give much for the whole culture, dedication and stuff. Twitch is more embracing the whole core-gamer-culture and youth, making it quite hard to be accessable for everyone else.
I think ultimately their buyout of Ninja, Shroud and others flopped hard. These guys drew huge numbers for Twitch and we're not even performing half as well on Mixer and this is not to mention that these guys we're at liberty to stream unpopular games as they pleased on Mixer because of their huge upfront payout.
Does anyone here know how video platforms like Twitch managed to get started considering how expensive cloud data transfer pricing is? The steam bandwidth is considerably higher then video bandwidth (twitch uses a bitrate at around 8000k while YouTube has 3414k for comparable 1080p60fps videos). They also cannot take advantage of edge delivery expect for very large streamers because viewers expect a latency of 3secs or lower to their favorite stream.
I am really curious if anyone here knows how they managed to get started? They probably couldn't take advantage of super low bandwidth prices until recently because they were too small but had very expensive requirements (a lot of streamers only streaming to a very limited amount of people with high quality while also having a few very very large streamers stream to a huge amount of viewers and all of that in real time).
> It makes me doubt the profitability of Twitch, although you can be sure they are breathing a sigh of relief today.
I think twitch is highly profitable these days. Streamers have a considerable amount of subscribers, who pay a monthly fee of $5 (or sometimes even more) and stay for long durations. Twitch takes a 30-50% cut (lower depending on how big the streamer is and if twitch likes the streamer). Even streamers who average less then 1,000 concurrent viewers sometimes have between 100-500 subs.
And they have also created bits, which is a virtual currency viewers can use to tip their favorite streamers and twitch takes a similar cut (and they only let you but it in bulk beforehand to make it less transparent on how much you actually spent on them, similar to many mobile games in-app purchase model). And they play ads before streams (and during streams if they streamer decides to play them for a small cut), they also heavily advertise amazon prime (twitch streams constantly say hey you can use amazon prime to subscribe to me for free), they have premium users and probably even more monetization techniques.
I think you're just mistaking Twitch for a recent unicorn. Twitch grew completely organically from Justin.TV in the mid-late 00's and the demands for hosting something like Justin.TV we're far lower than they are for Twitch now.
Just to put it in context, game streaming was picking up steam on Justin.TV before Instagram even launched. The juggernaut that Twitch is now was just inevitable.
People weren't around or just don't remember Justin.TV, UStream and similar services.
As a former Counter-Strike 1.6 player in a decent level I do remember the transition from watching eSports on HLTV and other in-game broadcast solutions to watching on Justin.TV or UStream.
I think the major turning point was around 2011-2012 and my days of competitive gaming were way behind me at that point so being able to watch pros through a live videostream was quite exciting, now it's just a given but it's been brewing for the past 10-15 years.
> Does anyone here know how video platforms like Twitch managed to get started considering how expensive cloud data transfer pricing is?
Don't use amazon, mostly.
If you're really small, there are lots of servers for rent that have gigabit+ connections at reasonable prices.
Once you're in the tens to hundreds of gigabits per second, you can get cheap connections in datacenters. If you were starting twitch today, you could get some $1500 10gig internet connections. Then one server can support 1500 viewers, with an average of 1000, and cost only about a fifth of a cent per viewer-hour for bandwidth. Not too hard to reach with an ad break, and a subscriber pays you much more than they cost.
Bandwidth gets more expensive as you go back in the years, but AWS has never been a good deal, and twitch had lower bitrates too.
If you just need 12.5 MB/s (100 MBit/s) unlimited traffic and are from Germany there are options going as low as €4/mo. Of course you won't get much video streaming from that ... but that's the case with 40 MB/s, too.
>Does anyone here know how video platforms like Twitch managed to get started considering how expensive cloud data transfer pricing is?
A very high quality stream at the start of Twitch was 2500 kbps. Viewership numbers were much smaller. This meant that bandwidth costs were significantly lower.
Back then ad revenue was much higher per user. Ad block wasn't common and I'm pretty sure ads paid more. This essentially allowed Twitch (and YouTube) to grow to become big enough.
Streaming sites before Twitch/JustinTV were even lower video quality. Eg livestream. We're talking about 480p looking good in comparison. Even the audio quality on those was poor.
Twitch actually had a great competitor in own3d.tv, but they had a lot of trouble paying out to the streamers. That eventually sank them.
It does, if you use e.g uBlock Origin. Twitch is actively trying to circumvent adblockers but so far hasn't been able to topple the more advanced blockers, even though they released SureStream[1] almost 4 years ago which is supposed to "weave" the ad directly into the source stream.
In the announcement[2] they mentioned:
> We are well aware that many dedicated Twitch viewers use software that bypasses ads, and the rollout of this technology will reduce the efficacy of such software. As a company we are agnostic when it comes to the use of this software. You are free to use it, or not, as you see fit.
I suspect that either advertisers or streamers aren't using SureStream or that it's quite resource expensive to "weave" ads into the source stream so Twitch simply isn't using it when the cost of doing so is more than it generates in ad revenue.
> FWIW when Twitch started as justin.tv it was much, much poorer quality than 8000k.
Yup, to expand on that I had a chance to chat with someone at Justin.tv and they said a thirty second ad pays a lot more than the cost of serving video for an hour. iirc this was around 2009 or 2010?
Also, iirc even through 2014, my friends who played League of Legends (lol) used to watch stream on VLC instead of directly on the website on Twitch. The consensus was for lol, 720p60 was preferable to 1080p30.
I don't think Twitch got where it got because of technical prowess. If I had to guess, it was just lucky being first. It would be interesting to hear stories from the people at YouTube. Why did it take them so long to add live streaming?
Justin.tv offered pro accounts for preferred data transfers, as it would lag just watching a stream at 360p at best (not that they had quality options back in the day). I know I paid for it, just so that I could watch illegal cough Simpsons streams.
Justin.tv/Twitch.tv wasn't first though. Livestream and Ustream, for instance, were relevant before Justin.tv. It's just that they messed up along the way and people always migrated to the next service. When people did so from Ustream to Justin.tv, the latter never really did and as such, people never really left. However, they had a competitor in the form of own3d.tv for a good amount of time....but own3d.tv lost the holding-the-breath battle, as I don't think they really had financial backing unlike Twitch.tv then. If any larger company had paid attention back then (around 2012), the international streaming space might have looked different.
Live streaming wasn't the issue, it was live gaming streaming. Everyone was blocking it because it ate up tons of bandwidth (and there were copyright concerns). Justin.tv was small, well connected, and knew the numbers well enough to know how to capitalize on it.
You should recheck that assumption and watch some of their old tech talks. They made some good pivots and had to move quickly to scale with the growth they had.
Small nit: quality and bitrate aren't directly comparable. E.g. codec and decoders choice can make a huge difference. E.g. A lower bitrate av1 stream can be higher visual quality than higher bitrate x264 stream.
Where this matters is that sometimes consumers will automatically assume bitrate=quality (especially in audio), and then claim one audio service has better quality than other just because they use a higher bitrate.
This is interesting given it's the same strategy that MSFT played w/ Windows Phone:
1. See a market that's doing really well that you didn't enter until 5+ years too late and the market is quite established.
2. Play catch up by paying a bunch of 'producers', streams/development houses, to come on board yet still doing the same thing everyone else does with zero base.
3. Exit said market because the money being pumped in is 100x or 1000x worse than the returns.
MSFT's other strategy, buy and then operate usually pans out better for them.
Mixer was also a comparable "second place" to Twitch at the time of purchase. Microsoft didn't anticipated YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming and couldn't compete with YouTube and Facebook for network effects, hence Mixer dropping to a far behind fourth place.
This comes at no surprise to the game streaming community.
A number of popular gaming stream helpers, namely Harris Heller from Alpha Gaming [0], have kept streamers away from Mixer to focus on Twitch and hosting VOD/highlights on YouTube in order to best grow a community.
Facebook is a large enough platform that this might cause some trouble for Twitch, but we'll see. I think the gaming community is deeply seated around Twitch/YT. Since Facebook has already lost tons of younger users, and rejects anonymity, and doesn't have dark mode, I don't think this will turn out very good for Facebook.
The name "Facebook Gaming" seems really bad branding to me. That would be like calling Instagram "Facebook Photos" or something. It just doesn't fit at all. At least Mixer had some name ID and some high profile streamers locked into contracts.
This usually comes down to whether you need a FB id to sign into something. Its "Facebook" if you need to be logged into facebook to get to it. In this case, its a way to keep you on the Facebook site longer, instead of fracturing off another uninteroperable (inopreable, teroperable?) platform.
Young people don't spend money on streamers like lonely men do.
"The Youth" are on twitch to burn mom or dad's free amazon prime sub, per month.. another reason twitches numbers are "high" compared to others.
Xbox could have spent that shroud and ninja money on free subs for Xbox gold holders.. and deliver more value, like the bezos-twitch prime sub shell game
On Twitch, "Subscribe" doesn't mean the same thing as on YouTube; it is a $5 monthly donation (except when a streamer has different tiers) that gets you no ads for that streamer and, depending on the streamer, exclusive emotes/chat room access. The typical type of subscribing where you are notified about a Streamer going live is called Following.
Where are the numbers on youth disengagement? Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. If I were a streamer that gets $ from donations, I should really target 18+ anyway, who are old enough to have a credit card.
Also, it seems like FB Gaming numbers are really taking off, partly due to signing some big names from Twitch. [1]
Lastly, they actually do support gamertags, but I’m iffy on the anonymity concept being a negative here. Twitch has a problem with some toxic chats, users making throwaway accounts to get around ban, etc. If I were a streamer, this would be a great alternative for me to build a community with less overhead in managing the toxic parts.
All in all, it doesn’t have to be a “winner-take-all”; it’s nice to have some healthy competition in the market, even if the only folks that can do it are the biggest players (Amazon / Google / Facebook.) I’m just _really_ surprised that Microsoft couldn’t make Mixer work despite the tight Xbox integrations.
>How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions.
I agree, but it's not that surprising given how strongly Facebook has dominated the North American market. In North America DAUs are at 253 million [1]; if you assume that the population of all NA is ~369 million [2], you virtually have tapped the keg, so to speak.
Growth rates are going to decline once you hit market saturation like that, which has nothing to do with Product or user trends - just straight macro trends.
I normally use twitch but with fb mixer news I decided to take a look into fb gaming. I was able to create a page named "namrog84" and then comment on someone's stream and all they saw was namrog84.
I'm sure it might be possible to figure out which facebook real name made and owns that page. But at face value I was able to stream and comment under my alternate persona. namrog84. Without having to make a new Facebook account. They have a drop down in streamer chat if you want to use your real name or a name of a page.
With that said, I'm very hesitant of fb gaming streaming and this is my first ever time really looking at it.
It's still trivially easy to create an account on Facebook without using your real name.
The first LPT I taught me daughters when they started using the internet is that on the internet, you are a super hero - no one should know your real name.
While I do wholeheartedly agree that your online self should be an alternate, detached persona, for someone underaged, falsifying information on an account on FB is against their TOS. Their entire business model is selling data about the "real you."
I don't have children, and as a 20-something I know the struggle and seeming impossibility of avoiding FB products, but I try to avoid pouring my whole identity into them. It's rough when the social culture is rapidly shifting to "unless you put everything online you're not worth my time" or makes you one of those "privacy nuts."
Sure I completely agree but these streaming personas are a business to some people and you might wake up one morning to the Facebook ban-hammer. Repeating the mistakes od depending on 3rd party services for a business model.
Your actual valuable personal data is your graph connections, not your node.
Once you start connecting, you unmask yourself quite easily - many have tried creating spare accounts (even with VPNs and separate browser contexts) and have quite quickly been shown their exist friend set as "recommendations by FB".
It's also very hard to keep that account anonymous due to the crazy about of data gathering Facebook does and the ways it used that data to recommend you to new "friends" and what not.
One word why I think this will work out well: money.
I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well.
FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical.
There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.
No way. This is literally exactly what Microsoft just did, and here we have the results. Facebook can try it, and they'll fail too.
There is absolutely _zero_ chance of younger demographics moving to facebook. I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance.
We've seen it again and again and again-- you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer. All either outright failed or stole at best a tiny fraction of market share.
There's so many examples of corporations trying and failing at this strategy that it's just a comic act by now.
Sure. Look at Google (Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos), look at Messenger (AIM, ICQ), look at GMail (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail), look at Facebook (Myspace), etc...
You absolutely CAN steal a userbase if the quality of your product is sufficiently better than the existing alternative. The problem with Mixer is that the only real advantage they had was latency, and that's not a big enough reason to draw people to the platform.
Facebook's current problem is that they want to use their existing network and one of the primary features of a gaming platform is anonymity. 99% of the streamers on twitch can't be identified by anything but their usernames, and that's the way they like it. Facebook is antithetical to that experience.
The examples you give are simply not comparable. In all three cases, this was not someone throwing a ton of money at something and copying it to try to steal it.
Google was made by two grad students who came up with a better way of searching. They invented a superior product and it took off on its own merits.
Gmail was largely created by one person helming the project on his own, and again it took off because it was VASTLY better than existing options. I was a Gmail beta user-- I remember! It wasn't even close.
Facebook, again-- not a corporation throwing a ton of money at something. It took off on its own, exactly as depicted in The Social Network. It was made by a handful of college students and people simply loved using it in the beginning.
Given your examples, you see to have misunderstood me as arguing that a successful product can never be replaced or lose its dominance. Of course I am not saying that, that would be crazy. I am saying a corporation or any other entity with a lot of money cannot replace a successful product using that money. They can only do it by actually coming up with a better solution to the problem, and that almost never happens-- they simply aren't able to do such a thing in most cases.
Instead they deliver hollow, branded imitations like the many examples I named, and they fail.
I agree. For me, the core problem with facebook gaming is that I'm not going to interact with a gaming stream while I'm logged into my facebook account. I use my FB account to connect with family, and it works great for that, and that's it. Using it for anything else just inevitably leads to messy information leakage.
A decentralized streaming network is technically infeasible with the current Internet. Keep in mind that every watcher adds upload bandwidth requirements to a node somewhere else in the network. Consumer network connections are too asymmetric for that.
Nope, I have nothing. The most popular thing out there is Acestream, which is a weird Russian fork of VLC that is probably spyware but it "just works". It's closed source and I have never seen anything written as to how it works, sadly.
My point was along the lines of, p2p streaming is feasible with current infrastructure because it already works under those less than ideal conditions
> you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer.
For serious scientific studies, anecdotal data is not useful.
For product fit, the experiences and feedback from your target audience are _extremely_ "relevant in the grand scheme of things." If your target audience is saying "I literally don't know anyone who would want to use this," yeah, that's relevant.
Unless you're aiming to imply that me and my friend group and greater gaming community are the exception and in fact the majority of young people use facebook, in which case....lol.
My "anecdotal experience" is interacting with dozens of gaming communities which mysteriously all link to subreddits and discords and twitches and never, ever a facebook group. That's not very anecdotal when these are communities of tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
Unless you're aiming to imply that me and my friend group and greater gaming community are the exception and in fact the majority of young people use facebook, in which case....lol.
Have you done a statistically relevant survey of what the “majority of young people do”?
As a reference, if you go to r/cscareerquestions you would swear that no other company exists for graduating software engineers but the big 5 tech companies and if you don’t spend every minute “learning LeetCode to work for a FAANG” your life is over and you might as well kill yourself.
But it's what it is. Most people active on Facebook 10 to 5 years are not active anymore, and young people avoid it. If Facebook wants to attract young gamers, they will need a new brand for their gaming platform.
"Around eight-in-ten (79%) of those ages 18 to 29 use Facebook". Anecdotally, I know a number of people who 1) say they hate Facebook 2) say they never use it 3) show up in my feed at least once a week for the last month.
I think there's an under-reporting problem here, where there's a stigma associated with using Facebook (it's for old people!) yet younger people still use it a lot. Note that this doesn't bode well for launching a service aimed at people in their 20s. Even though they're the most common demographic, they might not want their peer group to know they're using it.
I would have expected a big rise around 18-22 because a lot of college / University and other interest group activity is there, and there are more varied friend groups and family to keep up with.
The 4th survey for 13-17 year olds with 50% is somewhat surprising for me though.
The average gamer is 34 years old
70% of gamers are age 18 or older
Considering FB has between 2.5 and 3 billion users. FB has much more chances of success considering its size, its user base, its built in advertising platform, its global reach, etc. Streaming and gaming isn't just about 12-18 year old gamers. If you're thinking monetization, there's not a whole lot to gain there for the majority of steamers. Not a whole lot of 12 year olds can support streamers financially. So sure, maybe it won't be the platform of choice for the 16 year olds, but doesn't mean it can't be dwarfed in size by the rest of the demographics who are also into gaming.
Don't forget, gamers of yesterday who started with the earliest consoles or who got on board anywhere between atari, NES, SNES, Sega, PS1, PS2, or PC gamers, are still gamers today.
MS already did that by paying Ninja ~30M to stream on mixer originally. He averaged like 2K viewers. They did the same with shroud with the same result. Now Ninja and shroud are supposedly being paid out in full for their contracts and are free to sign with any platform.
Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.
> Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.
Except Facebook did that. Rumors go Facebook offered them double their Deal from Mixer, but they declined. Though, others did take it. Facebook is bar far not as worse as Mixer for a streamer. If you have the matching games, you can be happy there.
I really don't understand this confusion about the ridiculous amount of money in gaming. Sony is projecting $20 Billion in revenue this FY. Nintendo is projecting 10, with no new console launch. There are multiple game developers who make billions of dollars every year.
Gaming is the most profitable and highest revenue part of the entertainment industry, and it's not even especially close.
The current rumor is that FB offered to double the Mixer contracts for Shroud and Ninja as well, and that both turned them down. Not sure how accurate said rumors are.
I guess I don't understand as it has been already proven in the marketplace that Shroud and Ninja can't attract new viewers so why would anyone overpay for their services? The only streamer that I could imagine that could drag viewers away from Twitch would be DrDisrespect but he recently signed a multi-year deal with Twitch.
The free prime sub is a huge deal not a lot of people are talking about. Also a huge portion of twitch subs comes from whales dropping blocks of gifted subscriptions.. especially the bigger streamers. They've gamified ePanhandling and they're falling for it
> One word why I think this will work out well: money.
This is indeed usually the strategy.
What people seem to forget though, is that Mixer is not the first streaming competitor that thought of the idea of "just pay streamers a bunch of money, and hope the viewers follow".
Although, in some sense, this does work, there is a long graveyard of failed attempts.
It is a bit of a winners curse. A platform can always just pay people a bunch of money to join their platform. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually making back the money that you spent on those creators.
And the reality is that none of the attempts to just buy out streamers, by vast over paying for them, has ever worked, for the long term.
Eventually the money spigots dry up, and the people spending the money start to wonder when they are actually going to make back on their investment (hint: the answer is never).
There's probably a place for streaming sites that cater to very very specific content. NSFW is the obvious one, but I imagine you could try to serve one narrow nice extremely well, like auto racing, speed runners, live coders, baking, whatever. Become known to that community and offer features that mainstream streaming sites don't want to provide because it doesn't make sense for everybody.
Although I agree with you that this strategy might work in a duopoly type situation, where there are two platforms competing against each other, in a borderline zero sum game.
The problem, though, is in markets where there are more than two participants.
What happens when Mixer does this strategy, as well as Facebook gaming, as well as youtube gaming? Answer: the costs shoot up into the stratephere, and all of them go bankrupt.
It is kind of like a game of chicken. Massively overbidding to buy out the entire market only works if there aren't other people out there who are willing to meet you at the same level of irrationality, and burn the whole thing to the ground, along with you.
IMO, the only real workable strategy, similar to this, would be if those are smaller platforms, agree to do some sort of team up (which is sorta what is happening with FB gaming and mixer), so that the irrational actors don't all lose the game of chicken.
I don't understand why Mixer, after failing to penetrate the game streaming market - didn't pivot to a tech/coder oriented streaming service. It would have better integrated with Microsoft's other products (GitHub, Teams, etc), and trivialized finding marketing/ad-fill partners.
Twitch has a 'science & technology' channel grouping which is nice, but there's a demographic mismatch and thus it has less than 10k viewers on average. This niche would have been a shoe-in for a Microsoft service.
I also wonder what would have happened in a parallel universe where Beam wasn't acquired by Microsoft.
It's a relatively smaller niche than gaming/esports, so such a pivot was unlikely.
Microsoft did admit there is a smarter pivot on the tech side, at least. Mixer's claim to fame over Twitch et al was lower latency streaming and Microsoft admitted they are already working to move the technical teams at Mixer to work on Teams.
> I also wonder what would have happened in a parallel universe where Beam wasn't acquired by Microsoft.
Best guess: something very similar. Beam would likely have also failed to break much of a second place against entrenched competitor Twitch and likely failed to find a solution to the network effects battles when Facebook Gaming or YouTube gaming started up. Best case for them would likely have been an acquihire by Facebook or YouTube rather than Microsoft in that scenario where Microsoft didn't acquire them.
> I don't understand why Mixer, after failing to penetrate the game streaming market - didn't pivot to a tech/coder oriented streaming service. It would have better integrated with Microsoft's other products (GitHub, Teams, etc), and trivialized finding marketing/ad-fill partners.
Because this doesn't make money, has a very low market and doesn't need all the expensive technology they invested into.
> Twitch has a 'science & technology' channel grouping which is nice
Exactly, and it sucks. I'm a dev, I occasionally watch there, but it's just not very good. Technology is just not good content for this medium. And a good streamer has the kind of personality which is hard to find with technology-affine people.
> but there's a demographic mismatch
Not true. There are many coders and people working in IT on twitch. They probably even make the biggest group outside of gamers.
Though, it's also true that Twitch does not sell this category well. There are many stuff outside of gaming which could be sold better. Creative-Categories have this problem too.
Interestingly, this indicates that the streaming market is saturated, and Mixer simply had no room to grow. The analysts probably didn't realize their gamble was a zero-sum game.
Ninja & Shroud weren't enough to tip the scales and Mixer had zero traction. Of course they will be fine, but it sucks for the smaller streamers that hitched their wagons to Mixer and are now left to hold the proverbial bag. Even more telling is that Microsoft is burying this news under WWDC20, probably embarrassed about the entire snafu.
Well, lots of streamers really don't like Twitch. But Mixer was a downgrade for most people in terms of features and functionality. Same situation with YouTube - a lot of content creators aren't happy with it, but everything else out there is just a worse version of YT. The bigger, older platforms have a lot of momentum.
It's okay to copy a product. You just have to do it better. And Mixer wasn't even close. I actually liked Mixer's video quality more than Twitch, but that's not what makes Twitch fun for users...
I’m pretty sure mixer had a ton of features twitch didn’t have at one point but I could be wrong. I just remember watching kabby in the height of the pubg craze and he had a ton of cool stuff no one on twitch had.
They have some better and different features; but also lacking in some features people considered essential.
For me as a viewer, an easy example is that taking clips of streams is relatively new to Mixer, and you can't even sort/filter them. Clips helped build a lot of Twitch streamers' popularity by making things bite-sized and shareable.
Is there a competitor that content creators _do_ like? I mostly stream to people I know so I don't care for the network effects of Twitch really. If there's something out there with higher quality video or a superior interface, I'd love to know about it.
> Interestingly, this indicates that the streaming market is saturated, and Mixer simply had no room to grow.
Facebook Gaming had the room. So did Discord, and with the Corona-Lockdowns also Zoom and other private Video-Conferencing-Services (though they are not exactly focused on public streaming). Mixer just never found their niche and strength, they sucked and failed because they tried to be another Twitch, instead of aiming to be their own.
Facebook Gaming is an afterthought that no one takes seriously (kind of like YouTube Gaming) -- for example, you couldn't even stream in 1080p (streams were limited to 720p) until mid 2019! Discord and Zoom have nothing to do with video game streaming and are, at best, tangentially related to the likes of Twitch. It seems like the streaming market is very much saturated because Microsoft took Mixer pretty seriously and it was quite feature-rich.
It's kind of sad to see Mixer/Beam go, they did have a couple unique features I made good use of.
- FTL protocol, a streaming protocol based on UDP which had sub 1 second delay times, far far superior to what Twitch is capable of.
- User interaction, I was able to quite quickly set up buttons on my page that let my stream viewers control the RGB lighting in my room in interesting ways, and it was a lot of fun for me as a streamer to get that realtime interaction with my viewers
The real-time nature of Mixer streams was amazing. I loved being on voice chat with friends while watching their streams, it felt instantaneous. Hopefully more platforms can pick this up (looking at you, 7 second latency Steam streaming).
I rarely watch twitch, and when I do it's for events (eg, Games Done Quick) and not individual streamers. I'm just past that being interesting in my life.
Discord though - they announced streaming and I thought it was ridiculous, but they've won me over. Among a friend group, where joining the stream also implies joining the voice chat, I find myself being drawn in when someone is streaming. It's great for: waiting for a round to end before you can join the group, reviewing replays as a group, "hey check out this cool thing", just seeing what's up with a game a few people are trying out, or (especially in post-covid19 world) just hanging out when you don't/can't (eg, eating) play at the moment but want some socialization. Combined with video chat and it makes a good platform for socially distant jackbox games - it just works compared to other video chats which seem optimized for slide shows and fail at streaming a game smoothly with audio.
I'm very familiar with Mixer my company does interactive streaming and I really liked Mixer/Beam they had a great team. Their mobile interactivity is next to their low latency as the high marks of the platform. I do think their audience acquisition strategy with large streamers was lopsided. Maybe if they went farther down the longtail and involved a lot more content creators they could have carved out a whole community. Really sad to see them go. Shameless plug warning but, if you're moving over to Twitch there are a lot of great extensions and you can always easily build one on your own with our tools at Muxy.
> FTL protocol, a streaming protocol based on UDP which had sub 1 second delay times, far far superior to what Twitch is capable of.
I don't use/watch any of these platforms but I heard the delay is a feature of Twitch to prevent people from "screen peeking" players when they play online.
You can always add artificial delay if that's what you want, but if you don't want to delay to interact with your audience/have them interact with the game, you want something that can do low-latency.
Totally. Avoiding screen sniping should be up to the streamer — in OBS, for instance, one could set up a scene with one source item, an instance of another scene, then add a delay filter to it.
Then one can freely switch between the live scene and the delayed scene. Simple.
The only thing I don't like about Twitch is they got rid of their Roku app. I assume it's Amazon's doing, but it still eliminates a large portion of users who want to watch gamers on Twitch.
If I'm Twitch the #1 thing I'm thinking about right now is how to extend the olive branch to all of these creators. Favorable partner terms, sponsorship, resources etc.
This is a market share growth opportunity that comes around very infrequently
Twitch is already over 70% of the streaming market. Let's say that both of them go to YouTube. Let's also say that Ninja and Shroud accounted for all of Mixer's market share..
That would give YouTube roughly 20% of the market, up from about 17%. Twitch is still 70% of the market.
Twitch should be looking for ways to make it easier for streamers to stream and get noticed. Find the next Ninja.
I'm not really into that whole scene, but my third-hand understanding is that the Amazon Prime integration is a form of this. Basically, while Microsoft offered millions to people like Ninja, Amazon offers somewhere around three dollars each month to each Prime member, with the restriction that they must give it to a mid-sized or bigger streamer that they enjoy. This makes it worth the time for growing streamers, and lets big-but-not-Ninja-big folks make a job out of it.
It's actually a pretty interesting economic / business model case study: they're basically crowdsourcing which streamers they subsidize while simultaneously offering a cross-promotional perk to an existing customer base.
Just conversations, but a quick googling points to twitch.amazon.com. That appears to offer Amazon Prime members "free channel subscription ($4.99 value) every month".
Maybe market share isn't the right way to frame it. Much of the success of gaming platform's is built on goodwill. Due to their botched attempts with bans, community guidelines, harassment, toxicity etc. Twitch could certainly use some positive press these days. IMO it would be seen as a great PR move to welcome these newly platform-less streamers will open arms. Facebook is already offered people who move from Mixer to FB Gaming and stay for 90 days somewhere in the range of $2.5K
Will most of them probably move to Twitch anyway? Yes. Will Twitch be losing money in the short-term by giving away value here? Probably. But in the long-term having these ex-Mixer folks happy and feeling welcomed will have positive impact on their fans, communities, and gaming as a whole. Not to mention the revenue potential these folks could bring.
It's always a bad Idea to be arrogant and sit lazyly around instead of activly working for your future. They now dominate the market, but what if the mixer-streamers now move to Facebook or Youtube and strenghten them, giving them a push to kill twitchs dominance next year or in 5 years?
Which is why I said they should be looking for the next Ninja. The assumption that Ninja and Shroud would always be bankable can be just as arrogant and lazy as anything.
Totally agreed. Ninja already peaked in 2018 and is a depreciating asset. Shroud is still going steady but clearly failed to bring in his Twitch numbers to Mixer even with his clout.
because you dont want your competitors to get anymore air than they are getting already. 73-17 is better than 70-20. if youtube gets its act together on the streaming front they are a big problem because so many more people that don't currently watch streams use it compared to twitch.
They're still important and it builds good will which helps them gain more loyalty from the viewers. E.g. Facebook spies on you while Twitch supports the creators I like.
You would think that, and you'd be wrong. Many streamers dislike Twitch, in the same way many YouTubers dislike YouTube for their policies. Most stick around, because they saw what happened to Ninja, and he represented the best of what could be possible; your viewers by-and-large wont follow you, your community is on Twitch, they're not your community, they're Twitch's community.
Twitch could be a lot worse, and they'll probably get a lot worse now losing their only decent competition. The general murmur around the Twitch exclusivity deals was that they 10x'd in value and quantity after Microsoft put a price on Ninja. Unless YouTube gets serious, the same level of serious that Twitch and Mixer were, Twitch has no reason to add value to these streamers. The streamers wont leave; they can't.
And we all know YouTube won't do the right thing by their content creators, because they already don't.
This is a very dark day for content creators. Mixer failed, but it at least represented literally the only threat on Twitch's radar; there was always the question of "well what if Mixer blows up" guiding biz-dev at Twitch. Unless streamers band together and unionize, Amazon is going to crush them.
If there is 10x to be made outside of Twitch I am pretty sure content creators will organize and create their own streaming platform. They know who is who, it takes some weeks to get everybody on board and then Twitch has a serious competitor. For that reason, payout won't get down.
Except that they'd have no idea how to get started and even if they did move, nobody else would follow, just like what just happened. Twitch is the Netflix of streaming. Doesn't matter who else does what, people will watch Twitch + <other_streaming_company>
Market share growth? Twitch could offer them nothing and they will all end up back on the platform anyway. I'm sure they will get deals cut, but it won't be anything remotely close to what they got from Mixer. Other streamers have filled their voids and then some.
He already updated his Twitch profile, he's coming back for sure. Only other way I see would be a really big YT Gaming Contract but I think YouTube is just sleeping right now.
My concern is how FB Gaming will be installed/embedded into the Xbox dash. If it's like the current FB SDK, does that mean that FB will be siphoning data off xbox users that don't use FB?
I've been an Xbox player since the very first one, and my gamertag has been Xbox Live Gold (and now GamePass Ultimate) since the dawn of the service. If they have the audacity and malice to shove Facebook on my dashboard, I will buy that hideous PS5 without giving it a second thought and switch wholesale.
A closer partnership with Facebook is going to loose Microsoft the coming console generation just like their focus on “TV is the new water cooler” lost them the last one.
This is how I convinced my parents to buy both a PS2 and PS3 - the PS3 was one of the most affordable blu-ray players when introduced, it just happened to have a game console attached to it.
The difference is that everyone (to some approximation) who is likely to buy a PS5 has a computer of some description that is perfectly capable of streaming media - you're not thinking "oh, I need to get that console so I can watch Facebook Gaming".
I find it intriguing that generally speaking, people have issue with monopolies. Yet, as much as everyone claims there's a free market, MS has failed with both a mobile OS and a streaming service, and essentially gives it over to the giant.
FB didn't even need to do anything, just their existence and networking abilities is enough to make alternatives unviable.
I do wonder what we will do in the long term as most places are centralized. Google and Apple for a mobile OS, FB (or FB properties) for social networking, there's Twitch for streaming, YouTube for video hosting.
These days, the chances of competition are (IMO) impossible due to the sheer size and influence (and power) of these mega giants.
> I find it intriguing that generally speaking, people have issue with monopolies. Yet, as much as everyone claims there's a free market, MS has failed with both a mobile OS and a streaming service, and essentially gives it over to the giant.
When people take issue with monopolies, they are not asking for a company like MS to break that up. They are asking for smaller, independent players.
According to the most recent Streamlabs report:
YouTube Gaming Live accounted for 22.1% market share for 2019 in terms of hours watched while Twitch market share accounts for 75.1% and Mixer market share accounted for is 2.7%.
Youtube Gaming is also growing extremely fast since they have rolled out their new creative suite.
Facebook Gaming hardly has any market share so I don't understand why you are saying their existence and networking abilities is enough to make alternativeS unviable. The streaming industry seems to be one of the most competitive markets out there.
I've heard good things about the mobile OS, but with Mixer Microsoft missed the mark.
They did a decent job of copying the Twitch UI to make the transition familiar, but then had a number of unnecessary friction points that I'm sure drove folks away. As an example with my own experience: I was a somewhat regular Shroud viewer on Twitch. When he had his first Mixer stream I tuned in, only to find out that A) his overlay notifications hadn't been integrated and B) I couldn't even minimize the chat pane of the viewer without signing up for a Mixer account, which was an onerous process.
Not having a large streamers overlay integrations working prior to his debut stream tells me that MS does not understand how critically important community engagement is in live streaming.
Forcing me to sign up just to be able to control the viewer UI drove me away and removed any chance of me returning and finding organic reasons to sign up for Mixer.
That was the one and only time I watched Shroud after his move.
>stars like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Cory “King Gothalion” Michael, and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek — will be released from their contracts, and Microsoft says it’s up to them where they decide to go.
>“It’s up to them and their priorities,” says Vivek Sharma, the head of Facebook Gaming, meaning the platform isn’t actively pursuing exclusive agreements with any of Mixer’s biggest names.
Really surprising move, considering that's the main thing Mixer had going for it. Facebook got the short end of the stick on this deal, considering they'll have to negotiate again with these Twitch streamers.
Now that these streamers have an idea how much engagement and money they'll be losing from switching platforms, they'll probably demand more from FB Gaming for an exclusivity contract. I haven't heard people talk about Mixer being a better platform or experience for streaming, so I'm not sure what FB gets out of this considering Mixer's talent was its most valuable asset.
$30M for not even a full year, and not even a gigantic brand hit (they seemed to retain their fanbase pretty well, and did well with Youtube clips) sounds like a great deal.
This amount of money is crazy to me. Are these guys really that big of a draw? Are they just so good at the games they play or are they funny/entertaining?
2 summers ago when Ninja was really popular I did a back of the envelop calculation on total viewer hours over a year and it was roughly the same as a season of the Big Bang Theory.
Obviously not comparable for a variety of reasons (viewer quality, syndication, youtube clips) but that show was spending 100+ million on just the main cast.
Ninja is really marketable. He has merchandise sitting in Walmart, was on big tv shows like Ellen or hosting a NYC New Years Event.
He's the face of gaming for all the non-gamers right now.
Shroud is just a very good gamer and has a big audience, he's not that marketable compared but still worth a decent penny I guess. He's probably considered the best FPS streamer out there whenever a new game comes out. He's the go to for many.
They are entertaining enough to a big group of people and they managed to build and sustain their audience. It's like asking is Robert Downey Junior the best actor in the world. If you don't see the value that just means you aren't the target audience
Well, if they were paid in full, it's because that's how Ninja/Shroud and their lawyers were able to negotiate the contract. It's arbitrary. The contract could also have just been "contract terminated if Mixer ends".
Mixer had potential as a streaming platform, they completely failed to create a culture anything like what Twitch has. Any streamer who wanted to move to Mixer would have to sacrifice being part of that Twitch community.
Their culture is 100% why they failed. They were technically far superior to Twitch. Their video quality was much better with lower CPU utilization, their latency was extremely low, and their UI was intuitive and butter smooth.
Their culture though... Before Shroud and Ninja joined, there were rules that you couldn't tell people your age. They had rules on how wide your shirt straps could be, and just generally seemed like if you had any opinions on other people, you would be chastised. They valued explicit political correctness, but that's not so good when you're making a place designed for just chilling and hanging out... At least, not when you're trying to grow.
They valued explicit political correctness, but that's not so good when you're making a place designed for just chilling and hanging out... At least, not when you're trying to grow.
Another way to word it is that the online gaming community is extremely toxic and you have to accept a decent chunk of that toxicity to grow a community in the gaming space.
What I am about to say, I mean with absolutely no disrespect. What you consider non-toxic is considered uptight and overly sensitive by many... Whether you think that's right or not is beside the point. I understand the need for political correctness and politicing at work. It keeps conflicts from arising and it avoids hurt feelings. It's not as valued by many people outside of work. That can affect the growth of sites like this.
Put in another way: each stream is an individual community. By making such explicit rules, they are policing culture and suppressing certain identities. That is counter to the environment needed for growth.
I don't know, I think this is a bit harsh -- I'm not arguing the gaming community isn't toxic, it certainly can be -- but rather I think Mixer wanted its community to be just like those actors who played hip 20-somethings in "real gameplay" game trailers at E3. It always seemed to have a "hello fellow gamers" mentality, and simply did not "get" the type of people it was trying to recruit.
If a stream and its viewers is a community, then on Mixer you didn't really have the chance to make that community "yours" -- rather, you had to be what Mixer wanted you to be, which is some made-up archetype of the advertiser-friendly hip gamer who captures that coveted market segment without saying anything even remotely controversial.
> They were technically far superior to Twitch. Their video quality was much better with lower CPU utilization, their latency was extremely low, and their UI was intuitive and butter smooth.
This sounds like FUD. The streamer controls the video encode, not the platform. Also Twitch has had <1s latency streaming for more than a year.
By courting big names like Ninja and Shroud though, I feel like Mixer wasn't interested in "creating" a culture, they wanted to flat out "buy" twitch's. Safe to say it wasn't successful within the past year, but I'd expect it to take much longer than that anyways. Why would they give up right after dumping a huge amount of time and money into it?
Remarkable if Microsoft really thought they could just buy two big streamers (and a couple of smaller ones) to get Mixer going and that Twitch market share - without making much change to the platform and its community.
"A typical Microsoft" I guess?
Big pay day for Ninja & Shroud though if they're really just free to join Twitch again, their returns will be huge.
What if you're not a partner on the other platforms, can you still stream to Facebook, Youtube, Twitch, all at the same time? Smaller streams rely heavily on chat and interactions, but 1000+ viewer streams generally don't so you don't need to read 3 different chats. You can still receive donations and maybe ad money?
The streamer known as Destiny and Giant Bomb sort of do this. They stream on Twitch but they accept monetization through alternative means. Destiny is actually exclusive to Twitch, he just hosts his streams on his own website and accepts subscriptions and donations there in addition to Twitch, all of his chat is on his own website though. Giant Bomb is not monetized through Twitch, it's monetized through CBS Interactive and hosted on their own site, but the stream is a Twitch stream. So they're not on multiple platforms, but they've not tied themselves to Twitch's monetization.
Why do you think this would help? Going from 0 to 1 viewers on one platform alone is quite hard, and then again for 1 to 10 viewers. You would have to put in that effort for each different platform, and ultimately you would still need to pick one and ditch the others once you qualify for partnership
As was implied in my comment, I was thinking of larger streamers with thousands of viewers that don't rely on chat. Someone like Ninja who gets 100k viewers could get a couple thousands more off other platforms potentially.
In addition to some of the other well-thought-out replies, much of the allure of streaming comes from live interaction, donations, chat, etc. Streaming to multiple platforms at once is more feasible for events like esports competitions, but would really make it difficult for a streamer to engage with their audience.
While it's a bit harder to engage with audiences on multiple platforms, it's definitely possible.
Since the communication direct is still mostly one way, you can e.g. aggregate all the chats from multiple platforms into a single one, and treat it like you would right now. Rocketbeans.tv, a German television-like streaming station that I watch a lot has a "superchat"[0] that does just that (which I think they built in-house), and it works really well. From a quick search, it looks like Restream.io also provides such a tool.
not sure about others, but for twitch if you become a partner, required for most (all? don't remember) monetization you can't stream to other platform.
Mixer has a nice streaming tech. I used to stream to a friend who could interact (voice chat) with me with almost no stream delay (<500ms). I don't think Twitch offers a latency as low as Mixer. Last time I tried (some weeks ago), it was still 2+ secs.
Some 2019 streaming numbers from pre-Corona era which I found interesting at that time.
Mixer declined in hours watched after summer of 2019.
Also interesting to see that Facebook "Gaming"'s top games only feature mobile games.
Being a gamer myself I therefore find it difficult to really view them as a serious competitor to the game streaming market of YouTube and Twitch. Maybe this will change with Mixer's user base.
Bummer. Streaming from the Xbox was easy and fun. You could stream a multiplayer game with your friends! Friction was reduced to stream and you didn't need to mess with stream keys or overlays. Sad.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This was a very nice Xbox feature. They had it for PC on their Xbox bar for a while; You could stream any window or your desktop to the same mixer account as your gamertag. Then one day it just disappeared. I guess that should have been a sign they were having issues.
>dead streaming is shutting down and partnering with dead streaming
The only real alternative to Twitch is streaming live on YouTube. Not a competitor, but an alternative. And that's only because they have a massive viewership already. A lot of those probably never heard about Mixer or even Twitch at all.
You'd think it's the same with Facebook, but that's like a different target audience. You don't usually go to Facebook to binge videos. Just like it would make no sense to stream live on Twitter.
is FB gaming even a platform that people want ? I just get annoyed and skip past stuff that shows up on my feed cause that's not how I want to use FB ever.. If I wanted to watch someone streaming I'd go use a site specifically for that, but maybe my internet use is dissimilar to how most people expect content to be delivered?
> Sources: Facebook offered an insane offer at almost double for the original Mixer contracts of Ninja and Shroud but Loaded/Ninja/Shroud said no and forced Mixer to buy them out. Ninja made ~$30M from Mixer, and Shroud made ~$10M
Man, getting paid to switch just to have the service go bunk anyway. Probably one of the easiest $30M ever. I really wonder if he lost any sort of revenue over those months that he switched? I can't imagine it coming anywhere close to the $30M he made just for the time.
Ninja had 80-100k viewers when he switched to Mixer, and now on Mixer he has 2-5k. Each sub on twitch was making him $3-4/month (do not know how many subs he had, but I can imagine 10-30k). So, he lost $30-$120k on Twitch subs alone per month.
Then an Ad on Twitch in front of 100k viewers is different than an Ad on Mixer (not really sure if they have Ads on Mixer). With Ninja's viewership on Twitch 60 second Ad, can probably bring him more than $10k. Not sure if he had used Ads though (may streamers chose not to use them).
All the rumors about MSFT cashing them out seem highly unlikely. They definitely got money but not all of it. If they got all of it, then MSFT lawyers are probably the shittiest lawyers in human history (and Ninja’s/Shroud’s the best).
I can see Facebook trying to lure them with similar contracts but I think that’s just part of the stupidity of trying to dominate in this space.
I’m gonna assume that they signed agreements where they were only getting paid the bulk based on performance numbers tied to their presence in Mixer.
So it’s clear that their brands didn’t do shit for Mixer, and now Twitch knows this so they lost any leverage they could have. But they probably are going back to Twitch because they can get way more distribution and keep building their audience. They just won’t get the same benefits they got with those exclusivity deals.
Those streamers are clearly the biggest losers here.
Do you have a source? Because when this type of thing happens, that’s usually a common fake rumor. People just want to shit on big corps so they relish on the idea that those corps lost large amounts of money.
If it’s true, then MSFT needs better lawyers to write their contracts.
"Facebook offered an insane offer at almost double for the original Mixer contracts of Ninja and Shroud but Loaded/Ninja/Shroud said no and forced Mixer to buy them out. Ninja made ~$30M from Mixer, and Shroud made ~$10M"
Yes, I know it is a tweet, but slasher is widely thought of as the leading game journalist, when it comes to gaming "leaks" and the like.
For a 30m contract, the streamers are not going to be swindled by the fine print.
The contracts will have had break clauses if MS doesn't support Mixer enough or it discontinues Mixer. Prolly also have minimum revenue numbers for the streamers too.
Streamers don't want to be locked to a service which makes them irrelevant.
> If it’s true, then MSFT needs better lawyers to write their contracts.
Contracts are a function of power.
If you are asking me to leave roughly $1.5 million+ guaranteed per year for your service that's going to bring me effectively zero for years, you're going to have to pay me quite a lot in cash.
$10 million is about the 10 year run rate--which is a bog standard valuation for a business.
Wow that came out of nowhere. Mixer could be so great but they're massively mismanaged with what I guess is out of touch management. They had such a big budget and still failed. Like many couldn't get used to the bad site and never used is. But competition for twitch would have been nice. The internet can be weird.
I always hoped Mixer would do better, I really liked watching E3 conferences on it over Twitch and YouTube. Its latency really was way better than them, and it seemed like Microsoft had better infrastructure overall.
non affilite/non partnered streamers don't have quality selection and if they stream 720p 60fps I have to watch that.
I honestly don't even know what's the problem because I can even stream on Twitch easily pretty much up to 10000kbps. But once I start
watching almost
any stream heavy buffering starts.
How long did Mixer exist again? For the people here who think GitHub is too big too fail under Microsoft… and let's not forget that MS used to have its own code repository website before shutting it down...
I'll give credit to Mixer for 1 thing they did do well, you will only expect proper gaming channels.
Nowadays, Twitch is filled with "Just Chatting" which you have people doing illegal watch parties of copyrighted content or girls showing just enough skin to not get banned. Twitch is slowly becoming a degenerate platform.
No, but I can fully understand their viewpoint, especially if they have kids to monitor. People forget part of the reason YT has been cracking down heavily on the behavior and content within streams and static video is complaints from parents and politicians, not just advertisers or nebulous "social justice" groups. What we may see as perfectly acceptable is not the same as the parents of a young teenager trying to prevent their kid getting bombed with Rule 34 content because they were suggested a Fortnite stream.
I think the problem with video, and the monopolies it continues to create, is the massive expense of data transfer. I'm guessing Mixer had hundreds/thousands of streamers active at any given time. I assume this was a massive cost and the revenue to support it (even ignoring their deals with streamers like Ninja/Shroud) just wasn't there.
It makes me doubt the profitability of Twitch, although you can be sure they are breathing a sigh of relief today.