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.
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.