In four years, Twitch, a site that allows viewers to watch people play video games, rose from a small streaming service for a niche audience to one of the biggest sites for American gamers.
The website has streamed numerous eSports tournaments, various competitions and is now an integral part of the gaming community-- so integral that is has more 100 million viewers a month.
According to an infographic the company released recently, Twitch has more than 1.5 million streamers and 100 million viewers on a monthly basis. On top of that, 12 billion minutes of footage was watched in December of 2014, twice as much as in January of 2013. The site doubled its edge capacity, adding servers and network capacity in Ashburn, Los Angeles, Dallas, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and San Francisco. The company has also localized the site and translated it into 24 different languages.
The top five games watched on a daily basis, which alone count for 61 percent of all viewership on Twitch, include League of Legends, DOTA 2, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and World of Warcraft. The streaming service was able to raise over $10.5 million for charity though numerous events this past year as well.
On top of that, Twitch added a number of technological features in 2014, including a free music section, direct-from-console streaming capabilities for iOS, PS4, Xbox One and Nvidia Shield Tablet and social media integration.
It's unclear what Twitch's future will look like, but here's hoping that 2015 is another amazing year for the community.
