Streaming the news is a challenge. Legacy news outlets stream their standard TV broadcasts. Some individual streamers react to current events live for their viewers. But nobody has really figured out how live streaming and the news fit together.
People stream many different kinds of content on Twitch, yet there is no "News" category. In fact, the closest thing to news is a category known as "Just Chatting," where streamers focus primarily on talking rather than playing a specific game. In order to communicate that our streams concern news events, we have to reference that fact in the stream's title.
For individual journalists and news streamers, amassing viewers on a platform primarily dedicated to gaming content is a challenge without a dedicated category. For those with more resources, such as network news channels, streaming the news is a challenge for other reasons.
In an interview with our team, Washington Post reporter Gene Park explained that the media industry is stuck on broadcast-style news. Park used to work on the Washington Post's live streaming team before the operation was ended two years ago. In his opinion, cable networks just don't understand the difference between TV broadcasting and live streaming.
NBC News is one of many legacy media companies that stream their standard TV broadcasts to YouTube. As shown in the screenshot, chat is disabled and viewership is relatively low.
One surface level problem Park identified is money; networks don't want to give content away for free. But young adults are fully prepared to pay for content online he argued, citing subscription sites such as Patreon. However, the real problem that networks can't grasp is that streaming takes a different kind of personality. People watch streamers to get away from that classic broadcast facade of omniscience.
Streaming is simply not an attractive medium for networks that have spent decades establishing their TV presence, so they aren't willing to dedicate resources to expansion into streaming platforms.
Despite Twitch's focus on video game live streaming, there is a group of creators who use the site as a platform for discussing current events. The most successful of these news and news-adjacent streamers is Hasan Piker, a self-described political commentator known as HasanAbi on Twitch, with over 825,000 followers.
In this clip from one of Hasan Piker's streams, he reacts to a New York Times article that mentions his Twitch channel.
Piker is known for doing both solo streams where he reacts to current events on his own (including chat, of course) as well as teaming up with other creators and journalists to stream discussions about political news. Piker's content is not exclusively news-related, which is true for the majority of similar Twitch streamers.
Another popular news-adjacent twitch channel is TheSerfsTV, followed by nearly 30,000 people. During a recent nine-hour stream, channel co-host Lance spent two hours playing the popular video game Among Us with Piker, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others.
When discussing politics and current events, the Serfs channel uses similar strategies to Piker, including conversing with other streamers while live, as well as presenting segments solo while engaging with the chat.
TheSerfsTV host Lance discusses incoming election results with eight other creators.
TheSerfsTV host Lance discusses incoming election results with eight other creators.
Throughout the ten weeks we spent working on this project, we tried a variety of different methods of introducing news into our streams.
Several of us tried simply discussing headlines and current events on stream. This format was promising but lacked the hook needed to attract an audience on Twitch.