Live Streaming Viewership Hits Four-Year High As Kick Surges And Twitch Loses Ground

Stream Hatchet’s 2025 annual report shows over 36 billion hours watched across platforms, with platform fragmentation accelerating Live streaming viewership reached 36.4 billion hours watched in 2025, a 6% year-over-year increase that brought the industry close to its 2021 pandemic-era peak of 37.1 billion hours, according to Stream Hatchet‘s “2025 Live Streaming Trends Report.” The growth rate, while positive, represented a deceleration from the 15% increase recorded in 2024. Platform Power Struggle Twitch remained the most-watched live streaming platform with 19.2 billion hours watched, but its market share fell 8.3 percentage points over the course of the year. The platform recorded three consecutive quarterly declines in viewership, and Q4’s 4.4 billion hours were the lowest since Q1 2020. Viewership from Twitch’s top creators fell 14.5% year-over-year, with streamers Baiano and Gaules transitioning to YouTube Gaming and Kick. The report attributes part of the decline to a mid-year platform policy change. “In July, Twitch announced that it would be implementing a series of measures to combat viewbotting,” the report states, noting this contributed to a drop in unique channels. At 8.4 million unique channels in Q4, Twitch recorded its lowest figure since Q1 2020. YouTube Gaming posted its highest annual viewership
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