Twitch was an accident. The live video streaming service, which boasts over 55 million unique users each month, began life in 2007 as “Justin.tv”: an all-hours video livestream of co-founder Justin Kan’s life. That wasn’t the whole point of the service, of course; later that year, “Justin.tv” opened up to the public, who could then “livestream” to various “channels.” At its inception, Justin.tv was a form of internet television, offering live broadcasts across a variety of topics. One such topic — gaming — took a particularly large portion of Justin.tv’s audience. So much so that, in 2011, the company spun out gaming into its own website: Twitch.tv. Three years later and Justin.tv is dead, the company is now known as “Twitch Interactive, ” and Amazon just bought it for $970 million. Not too shabby for an “accident”. WHAT IS TWITCH? Like Justin.tv, Twitch.tv is a live video broadcasting service. Unlike Justin.tv, Twitch focuses solely on gaming. More specifically, Twitch focuses primarily on e-sports: the burgeoning world of competitive games played professionally for money. For example! Twitch hosts a non-stop livestream of “The International, ” an annual game tournament. At The International, teams compete in a Valve game named DOTA 2 . Twitch broadcasts those games in real-time. This year, over 20 million people tuned in. Over 2 million people tuned in simultaneously at one point. Oh, and the winning team took home just over $5 million. So, what are those 20 million people watching? They are literally watching live video of a video game being played by other human beings. The live video often has commentary (sometimes by the players themselves, other times by other folks), and often has a picture-in-picture view of the players face. That description can be applied to much of the content on Twitch, albeit with varying levels of production. The International (seen below) is a massive event, so its stream has very high production value. In short, Twitch is mainly a venue for e-sports fans to watch live e-sports. But there’s another side to Twitch: participation. Within each Twitch user’s channel is an embedded chat widget, enabling the person (or people) broadcasting live video to interact directly with viewers. Interactivity expands the use of Twitch beyond simply watching e-sports being played live. For example! Game development studio Vlambeer use their Twitch channel to broadcast a weekly stream of game development. Since their game is already available to purchase, fans can offer feedback directly on what they’ve played, see what’s currently in-development, and even influence the final product. It’s a direct pipeline from development team to player. But these two examples are exceptions to the rule. They represent the “premium” end of Twitch’s content — the “whales” (especially high viewer numbers). Anyone can broadcast games on Twitch — even Engadget! — and, beyond using the web interface on a computer, it’s built into both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 . There’s even a new Android tablet with Twitch broadcasting capability built in. That accessibility means that the vast majority of video content broadcast on Twitch is, well, “just some person playing a game.” Some channels attract millions of viewers. Some attract single digits. WHO’S USING TWITCH? AND WHY? Twitch’s full user base is enormous : over 55 million “unique viewers” use Twitch annually, and over one million people use Twitch to broadcast each month. Not these guys The heavy-hitters — that is, the channels with the most views — tend to be “partners.” Twitch describes its “partner” program as such: “an exclusive group of the world’s most popular video game broadcasters, personalities, leagues, teams and tournaments.” That includes everything from The International to live broadcasts of press conferences; at this year’s big gaming trade show, E3, Twitch carried live broadcasts of every console maker’s press conference. That said, the people broadcasting on Twitch vary dramatically . Though e-sports dominates the most-viewed list, Twitch is home to some incredible — and incredibly bizarre — user-generated content. Take, for instance, ” Twitch Plays Pokémon .” Using Twitch, a programmer in Australia created an interactive game for Twitch viewers. He combined an emulation of GameBoy classic Pokémon Red with a bot that took text from chat. If a viewer entered “up” in chat, the character in Pokémon Red would move up. Simple enough! It becomes far less simple when hundreds of thousands of people are entering commands all at once. The result is what you see below. Madness Unbelievably, the game was eventually completed solely based on community commands. The system actually defeated a whole mess of Pokémon games . And now, fish are getting in on the action. Really! Yet another use of Twitch: the phenomenon known as “speedrunning.” The term literally means to complete a game as quickly as possible. Sound lame? Watch this incredible video of Nintendo classic Mario 64 being defeated in under 10 minutes . One particularly interesting subcommunity is helmed by the group “Games Done Quick” (GDQ). Each year, the group holds two marathons of non-stop live speedruns in an effort to raise money for charity (this summer’s event already happened , and they raised over $700K for Doctors Without Borders). In total, the group’s raised just shy of $3 million for charity by playing games as fast as humanly possible while live broadcasting the whole thing. As for the general public, live broadcasting became far more mainstream when it entered the living room. With Xbox One and PlayStation 4, living rooms were suddenly thrust online in full view of the world. In the case of PlayStation 4 tech showcase The Playroom , Twitch was forced to outright ban the game ; it enabled users to directly broadcast a full screen video feed of their living room. As you can imagine, that led to some occasionally lurid content. Of course, that’s also the exception — many are simply using Twitch, and game broadcasting in general, as a social platform. Their friends are online, and they can participate remotely in each other’s games, follow the same people, and broadcast or watch together. It fosters community, and it’s instantly relatable to a generation that’s grown up with fast internet and computer ubiquity. As Ben Davis wrote in a recent New York Magazine piece , “So much of social life has migrated online already; why wouldn’t it be the entertainment that was live and social and digital that feels most vital?” WHY SHOULD I CARE? Perhaps you like money? With Twitch’s huge user base , there’s plenty of opportunity to jump in and get broadcasting. Between running ads on your content through Twitch’s partner program and charging a subscription price to your channel (which gives viewers an ad-free experience), you could make it a full-time gig. Of course, you’re one of millions . But that never stopped anyone before, right? Okay, okay — let’s appeal to your more reasonable senses. This whole e-sports and live broadcasting thing is quickly becoming a pretty big deal. Maybe you dig traditional sports? E-sports might be your thing. The same rivalries transpire, and it’s full of the same human emotion. All the words they’re saying might sound like jargon at first, but that disappears after a few intense matches pique your interest. Though e-sports gained prominence with the mass popularity of competitive first-person shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo , the game dominating Twitch’s charts now are of the “MOBA” genre (multiplayer online battle arena). Of this genre, millions are playing League of Legends and DOTA 2 . Though from different developers and made independently of each other, both games are nigh identical in the way they play. Like sports, there is only one “arena” where players compete. Teams battle for control of the other’s side, carefully organizing tactics and strategies to win. In so many words, it’s a hell of a lot like traditional sports. Loaded as the term “e-sports” may sound, Twitch offers a great (and free) opportunity to give them a shot. At very least, the fantasy sports players among you will feel right at home. WANT EVEN MORE? Despite Twitch’s relative newness as a company and service, there’s been quite a bit of words spilled in that time. From New York Magazine ‘s excellent recent breakdown of the company’s purchase by Amazon, to our sister site Joystiq ‘s coverage of Twitch Plays Pokémon , to The Next Web ‘s interview with Twitch when the company spun out its video game arm, there’s quite a bit of material out there. Oh, and there’s the BBC ‘s recent take on defining the service’s importance to the uninitiated (seen above) and this recent piece from the New York Times which digs in on e-sports. [Image credit: Twitch (ESL TV), BBC Newsnight (“What is Twitch?”), Suzi Pratt/FilmMagic (The International DOTA 2 Championships, 2014), Vlambeer ( Nuclear Throne devstream), Shutterstock (“Gamers”), Twitch Plays Pokémon (via Joystiq ), Twitch (Fish Plays Pokémon ), Sony Computer Entertainment/Reddit ( The Playroom ), YouTube] Filed under: Gaming , Internet , Software , HD , Sony , Microsoft Comments

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What you need to know about the world’s most popular game streaming service, Twitch

Since it was teased in March, enthusiasts have been itching to see how Intel’s 8-core Haswell Extreme Edition processor (the i7-5960X) performs. It has now launched (along with two other Haswell-E models) and the reviews are in. Yes, it’s the world’s fastest desktop CPU — but the general consensus is “it could have been better.” Why? Because Intel recently launched a “Devil’s Canyon” CPU for $340 with a base clock speed of 4.0GHz that can easily be overclocked to 4.4GHz. The $1, 000 Extreme Edition chip, on the other hand, has a base clock of 3.0GHz and max turbo speed of 3.5GHz. Since clock speeds are often more important to gamers than multiple cores, that might disappoint many a Battlefield 4 player. On the other hand, with DDR4 support and eight cores (Intel’s highest count ever on the desktop), the chip should excel at pro tasks like 4K video processing and 3D rendering. Given the price tag, that might be the only market that can afford it. Here’s what the experts think. Hot Hardware Hot Hardware called the Haswell-E 5960X “a mix between kick-ass and meh, ” saying that it was actually topped in some tests by the i7-4960X, last year’s Extreme Edition model. That’s because despite having two less cores, the latter has higher clock-rates. Still, it found the new chip to be “mostly superior to the previous-gen, ” in terms of gaming and graphics performance. And if you’re into overclocking, the chip is more configurable than other Haswell processors. ASUS told Hot Hardware the chip was easy to take up to around 4.4GHz or so with decent liquid or air cooling, thanks to adjustable voltage, turbo and other settings. If you decide to do that, however, beware of your power bill: the chip has decent power efficiency at regular settings, but can jump to 180 watts or more when overclocked. Anandtech “Using the 8-core monster… does some financial damage, ” was Anandtech ‘s succinct sum-up of the CPU’s economics. $1, 815 and up is the bare minimum price for a fully configured system, but that can easily stretch to $5, 000 or more if you max out the RAM and graphics. The $1, 000 price of the CPU doesn’t help, but another issue is memory: DDR4 RAM is considerably more expensive than last-gen DDR3, running about $250 per 16GB. On the other hand, you will save a bit of money once it’s up and running. Tick for tick, the new CPU is more efficient than last year’s Extreme Edition 6-core model (provided you don’t overclock), and the DDR4 RAM runs at a lower voltage and consumes less power as well. Still, you’d have to be a serious gamer to justify the mild performance bump for the not-so-mild leap in price over chips like the 4GHz Devil’s Canyon model. Tom’s Hardware However, if you’re into video or 3D graphics, where time is money, it might be worth paying more. Tom’s Hardware took a close look at some real-life benchmarks, including 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC and Handbrake media encoding. The new chip tops almost all the charts, and actually bests Intel’s 8-core Xeon E5-2687W v2 in most — and that processor costs twice as much. Since most of the applications are heavily multi-threaded (unlike many games), it also wallops the quad-core, 4Ghz Core i7-4790K in all the tests. That means a 3ds Max render would run about 25 percent faster — which could easily save hours of time. Oddly, Tom’s also showed that if you’re into gaming, the two processors introduced along with the Extreme Edition CPU — the $389 Core i7-5820K with four cores and the $583 6-core 5930K — might actually be better. It said “games often favor architecture and clock rate over core count, ” and sure enough, Battlefield 4 and other titles get higher frame rates on those chips, thanks to the higher clock speeds. So if you’re a gamer, today’s announcement isn’t a total loss — but you may want to ignore the glamor chip and look at the two CPUs playing second fiddle instead. Filed under: Desktops , Intel Comments Source: Intel

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Review roundup: Intel’s 8-core Haswell-E is the fastest desktop CPU ever

You know what can teach you Braille and piano a lot more quickly than traditional means? Vibrating gloves, or gloves with haptic feedback, if you will. In fact, IEEE Spectrum senior editor David Schneider was so intrigued by the idea, that he put together his own version to serve as a haptic touch-typing tutor for his 11-year-old son. He admits that his gloves (made using transistors, $14 worth of vibration motors purchased from eBay and long cords connecting them to an Arduino Nano board) aren’t as sleek as Georgia Tech’s piano-teaching ones . But, hey, they worked, and once he created a program to go along with them, they did their job well enough. Schneider’s program displays one among the 100 most common English words at random on screen — it does so one letter at a time, sending vibrations to the right finger as the letters appear. Not bad for something he merely cobbled together. But (as he realized later on), the program would’ve been a lot more fun and effective if it were more of a typing game than a boring digital tutor. Filed under: Peripherals Comments Source: IEEE Spectrum

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Home-made vibrating gloves train your finger muscles to touch type (video)

If you typically share your computer and your browser with a sibling, a roomie or a friend who has no respect for your privacy, this latest Google Chrome beta update might make things easier for you. It comes with a pull-down menu that lets you easily switch users, put the browser to guest mode or launch an incognito tab on Windows, Mac or Linux. According to some comments in the update’s Google+ announcement , though, you still have to log off from your accounts to be sure your activities remain for your eyes only, just in case someone decides to peek. The guest mode automatically deletes the other user’s browsing information, on the other hand, so they won’t have to worry about you seeing their secrets. Aside from this update, Google has also unleashed a 64-bit Chrome beta for Mac, a few days after the company released a 64-bit stable version for Windows computers. This will make the browser launch more quickly and will generally make it faster than its predecessor. Finally, the new beta update also comes with a bunch of APIs for web app devs to play with. You can get Google Chrome beta (or any other channel you want, whether stable, Canary or Dev) through The Chromium Projects website . Filed under: Misc , Google Comments Source: Google Chrome Blog , Chrome Releases , Google+ , The Chromium Blog (1) , (2)

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Google Chrome beta gets account switcher and 64-bit support for Mac

America’s mad science division is at it again, this time imagining a future where your body won’t need (as much) medicine to stay healthy, simply by using the resources it already has. Put simply, a person’s peripheral nervous system runs the internal organs and summons the troops to fight off infections and repair injuries. DARPA’s just received $78.9 million of funding to look into harnessing this system to develop a miniscule implant that’d not only make people healthier and less prone to disease, but could also be used to treat mental health complaints like post traumatic stress disorder in the future. DARPA’s plan is to build implants no thicker than a nerve fiber that can then be implanted into people’s bodies. Once there, the devices would monitor the status of your nervous system, organs and overall health, keeping the system regulated by triggering responses through electrical impulses. In a way, it’s a bit like building a pacemaker for your central nervous system, except one that’s capable of helping people live with complaints like arthritis and other inflammatory diseases. According to neural engineer Dr. Douglas Weber, the eventual goal is to turn the body into a “closed-loop system, ” that continually assesses itself, ensuring that as soon as any sickness is detected in an organ, the body can quickly deal with it. The upside is that patients won’t need to take medicines (which can have adverse side-affects) because they’ll rely more upon their super-charged immune systems to deal with problems. Of course, even for DARPA, this is a big ask, since current neuromodulation implants are huge and require complex surgery to install, and we doubt that the technology will shrink to nerve-fiber sizes in just five years. That said, we’ll be first in the queue if this ever becomes available – after all, we’re fairly sure this is almost the plot of Jake 2.0 . Filed under: Science Comments Via: Motherboard Source: DARPA , Defense.gov (.PDF)

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US researching implants that’ll help your body and mind heal itself

If you’ve ever sat back, stared into the sky and wonder would happen if WhatsApp was taken over by a singing telegram service, then boy, today is your lucky day. Film director and artist Miranda July has teamed up with Prada sub-brand Miu Miu (nope, us neither) to design a social messaging app / publicity stunt with a twist. Instead of simply letting two people swap messages, Somebody (for iOS) finds a person in the nearby vicinity to your contact, asking them to walk over and deliver the message, in person, on your behalf. You can even add stage directions like crying or whispering, and the recipient can rate their delivery with a star rating in the same vein as Uber. If we’re honest, there are a whole host of reasonable, legitimate objections to this. After all, giving away someone’s personal location to complete strangers is a bit weird, as is the idea that people would willingly volunteer to break up with someone on your behalf. The app does exist and is available to download, although it seems that other would-be somebodies haven’t been able to get SMS-verified yet. I’ve signed up to convey two messages in my nearby area, but so far no-one’s sent over an address to deliver the missive personally. Maybe people aren’t impressed by my lack of obvious whimsy and a Miu Miu outfit, but if I do get sent on a mission, I will let all of you know how it goes. Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Apple Comments Via: Huffington Post Source: Somebody (App Store) , Somebody

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Get strangers to deliver the bad news with ‘Somebody’ messaging app

Microsoft’s 15-year-old MSN Messaging service will soon be a part of computer lore. It has been shut down in most places for over a year , but Microsoft kept it running in China where it was still quite popular. However, with the advent of Tencent’s QQ , Line and other services, Redmond recently emailed Chinese users (on their Hotmail accounts, naturally) that the service would ride into the sunset on October 31st. To give you an idea of how old it is, the service was created in 1999 by Microsoft to compete against AOL’s AIM chat service. However, we doubt too many users will get misty-eyed about its demise — the only nostalgia most folks likely have is how difficult it was to get rid of. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Via: The Verge Source: Technode

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MSN Messenger will finally, definitely be dead in October

It doesn’t yet have a name, but Ecuador’s new government-backed virtual currency is coming. That’s the thrust of a new report from the Associated Press , anyway — the country’s Central Bank is said to be gearing up for a launch sometime in December, though the juicy technical details and the mechanics of how citizens can get their metaphorical hands on these things are still shrouded in mystery. What does seem clear at this point is that Ecuador’s current cash (in the form of US dollars) isn’t going anywhere, and that people will be able to conduct transactions with each other from their mobile phones without big fees eating into them. If everything goes according to plan, this’d be the first time a national government has launched its own official digital currency, though that’s not to say some cryptocurrency nuts haven’t aimed to affect change on a national scale. Enthusiasts in the Czech Republic launched the CzechCrownCoin a few days ago in a bid to bolster online business in the country, and the Auroracoin folks made the virtual equivalent of $380 available to all the fine folks of Iceland… only to see its value tank over time. Comments Source: AP (PhysOrg)

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World’s first government-backed digital currency to launch in December

When Keuring Green Mountain announced that it would cut out third-party pods for the next-generation of its popular single-serve machines, other coffee outfits were up in arms. One particular company, TreeHouse Foods, claimed that it would take a short time for the code to be cracked (and filed a lawsuit , too). Well, Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee has done just that with its RealCup capsules. The company’s coffee and tea pods will work inside the recently released Keurig 2.0 brewers capable of brewing both single cups and carafe-sized batches. Keurig has licensing deals in place with big name coffee outfits like Starbucks, Peet’s, Caribou, Krispy Kreme, Twinings of London and others, but it’s the other not so well-known suppliers and the private label clientele that are set to suffer under the exclusivity. [Photo credit: m01229/Flickr] Filed under: Household Comments Via: Techdirt Source: Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee (PDF)

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It didn’t take long for a company to crack Keurig’s K-cup lockdown