Playing the river: One start-up's bet on esports broadcasts

 Twitch effectively categorised esports in April 2020 when the livestreaming platform introduced an ‘Esports’ specific tab onto its homepage. On today’s UI, the category rests alongside Gaming, IRL and Music with the subtext: “Live tournaments, match highlights, and your favourite pro players all in one place.” Gaming is for fun, Twitch seems to specify. Esports is for professionals, or at least, those on a path towards it. Before this categorisation, viewers had to know what they were looking for or be satisfied with what the discoverability algorithm fed them. Image credit: StreamCards RELATED: StreamCards raises $530,000, partners with The Esports Bible for closed beta The platform debuted ‘extensions’ in August 2017, as explained on Twitch’s Creator Camp page: “You can think of extensions as apps for your streams that give your community more ways to interact with you, each other, or what you’re streaming.” Like browser extensions, Twitch extensions are generally designed to enhance the experience of the core service. Twitch extensions allow the audience to vote, collect digital items, and interact in other ways with live-streamed content. Warsaw-based start-up StreamCards has devised a clever way to combine the over-the-top (OTT) functionality of Twitch extensions with in-game player performance data…
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