SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twitch, the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers, today announced the expansion of its global footprint spanning its event presence, infrastructure, and feature sets. In addition to returning to gamescom in Germany and the debut of TwitchCon 2015 in San Francisco, Twitch will unveil its first official booths at PAX Aus in Australia, the Electronic Game Show in Mexico, and Tokyo Game Show in Japan. By shining a live spotlight on major game conventions across five continents and continuing to build out infrastructure to better deliver these regional experiences to a global audience, Twitch continues to drive the social video movement.
As part of Twitch’s dedication to improving its quality of service for its global community of broadcasters and viewers, the brand has been scaling and expanding its infrastructure around the world. This month new points of presence went live in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea enabling geographically expanded video delivery and ingest.
Illustrating the success of the Tokyo expansion, a Japanese language stream was added to The Evolution Championship Series (EVO) 2015 broadcast. As a result, the second most minutes watched came from Japan where the stream attracted 1.4 million total views.
Twitch’s expansion spans a majority of continents with Europe and the U.S. representing other recent markets to receive an infrastructure boost. Over the past few months, Twitch has expanded its footprint in the UK (London), Frankfurt, Stockholm and Amsterdam, while U.S. infrastructure has continued to improve, with new locations (POPs) set up in Seattle, Chicago, Miami and San Jose, California.
Complementing the brand’s focus on quality of service around the world, Twitch has continued to grow its booth presence at all of the major game conventions. This includes the following:
- August 5-9: gamescom (Booth A-060, Hall 9)
- August 28-31: PAX Prime
- September 17-20: Tokyo Game Show
- September 25-26: TwitchCon 2015
- October 2-4: Electronic Game Show
- October 30-November 1: PAX Aus
All of these events will feature a stage for publishers and developers to showcase their games to audiences around the world and feature hosts from Twitch and the broader broadcasting community. The massive show floor presence at these international conventions will mirror what Twitch has established at events such as PAX East, PAX Prime, PAX South and the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), where it is the official live streaming partner.
“Twitch has a strong philosophy about creating personal connections between video game publishers, broadcasters, and their communities through facilitating face-to-face interactions,” said Jonathan Shipman, Senior EVP of Global Strategy, Twitch. “By building out our global event presence and infrastructure, we can continue to facilitate the creation of unique content by pairing these brands and individuals while broadcasting it to the world.”
In addition to bolstering the brand’s convention presence and broadcast quality of service, Twitch is committed to its localization initiative. This includes the introduction of Broadcaster Language Mode, which enables broadcasters to set their preferred language for chat,partnering with Xsolla to offer hundreds of ways to pay for Turbo and channel subscriptions, improving language translations, and adding language support to its iOS and Android apps for more than two dozen languages.
“Video games are a global phenomenon with a passionate consumer base eager to see the latest developments as they happen," continued Mr. Shipman. "As the leading live social video platform dedicated to gamers, our goal is to make the broadcasting, viewing, and social experience as seamless as possible, while showcasing content unavailable anywhere else. Being that converting borders into bridges is one of the keys to our success, we are dedicated to a continued focus on our global community through enhanced infrastructure, localization, customer service, promotion and event presence."
For daily updates, visit the Twitch blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page.
About Twitch
Twitch is the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers. Each month, more than 100 million community members gather to watch and talk about video games with more than 1.5 million broadcasters. Twitch’s video platform is the backbone of both live and on-demand distribution for the entire video game ecosystem. This includes game developers, publishers, media outlets, events, user generated content, and the entire esports scene. In February 2014, Twitch was ranked the 4th largest website in terms of peak Internet traffic in the U.S., fortifying the brand as an entertainment industry leader and the epicenter of social video for gamers. For more information visit the Twitch website and blog.