Twitch Wants to Be a Home for Traditional Sport as Well as Esports
32,000 people saw Team USA play a rubber basketball game in Australia at 7:30am Eastern this week. ICYMI: sports is a thing.
Published in
5 min readAug 23, 2019
What were you doing at 6am Eastern on Thursday? If you’re like most people, you were likely tucked up in bed.
But a surprising number of people were logged onto Twitch, watching Kemba Walker bag 23 points as Team USA trounced Australia 102–86 at an exhibition game in Melbourne, Australia. At its peak, 32,000 people were watching on.
And no, we’re not talking about a simmed game on NBA 2K20. For one thing, that’s not released for another two weeks. This is real sports. In Australia. At a godawful time of day. On Twitch.
It should come as a surprise to no-one that sports is a thing. But how big of a thing it is on a website best known for computer-coded, polygonal representations of sports has surprised even those inside the company.
