>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE!
Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media.
>> Hey, welcome back here everybody,
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center
with 68,000 of our closest friends.
It's E3, it's the biggest industry event in gaming
and we're pretty psyched to be here.
It's our first time, but our next guest has been comin',
I think he said for like 19 years.
So we're really excited to invite Chase to the set.
PR Director from Twitch.
Chase, great to see you.
>> Yeah, great to see you, too,
and you've oversold my time here.
It's actually only been 18 years.
>> 18 years, that's 'cause you missed one, I think, right?
>> Yeah, I took a break.
It was during one of the slower years
and then I came back into the fold.
>> So I'd just love to get your perspective
with kinda looking back at how the industry has changed,
how the event has changed,
and how gaming ecosystem has changed,
and the way people interact with these things.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
E3 has definitely gone through
almost a roller coaster in terms
of what it's like on the show floor.
My first year in '99, I was working with
the PR Team for the Sega Dreamcast launch
and we had a full stage show that every other hour
we'd have Ulala from Space Channel 5.
She would come out on stage and with a full dance troupe
and it would be like a vacuum.
All of the attendees in E3
would all be sucked into our booth
and then it would dissipate after that.
But every two hours it was like
the tidal wave comes crashing back in.
Every other hour we had in-line skaters
and graffiti artists for for Jet Grind Radio.
We had a second floor where local broadcast crews
could come and film the whole E3
'cause there's so much happening.
And everywhere you went, it was a bombast of noise.
And then, in the years that followed,
booths started getting more smaller,
not because of the scope of the show,
but because they were trying
to make it more industry-friendly,
less of a carnival ride and less of a competition
of brands trying to outdo each other.
But more of let's make this more about the games
than the booth babes and those things.
But then slowly, it started building back up
and it's gone through peaks and valleys.
So it's definitely been interesting to watch.
>> [Jeff] Right.
>> And we were talking earlier about, you know,
what are some of the biggest changes I've seen.
And, from the Twitch perspective,
it's seeing the validation of content creators grow.
You know, live streaming is a fairly new
aspect to the convention space, to the convention era.
I mean, obviously we've been doing it
for about a half decade or so,
but in terms of the validity of the creators themselves,
like in the past, they weren't treated as media,
you wouldn't see 'em on preregistration lists.
Now we have hundreds here at E3, you know,
where every year it doubles, the amount of content creators.
And it's not just because of E3 saying,
oh they're as relevant as traditional media if not more so,
but all the brands are leveraging them.
So what you'll find is, a lot of
live stream setups from booths.
>> People are streaming their contents.
When they're doing their press conferences,
they bring a lot of content creators in,
you know, put 'em in the front row.
You know, one thing I love about the content creator era
is that there's people like me who,
I'm a hard-core gamer, but I've been doing this
for so long that, even if I see a game I love,
I don't jump out of my seat goin',
oh my gosh, they've done it.
But when you have all these new gamers
who might've been gaming for a while,
getting that treatment that I did traditionally,
they're so vibrant about it,
there's so much more excitement.
And that's why E3 is so important,
but it's definitely so for the content creators
who traditional media might feel threatened by.
But I love seeing the energy they bring to the space.
>> It's such an interesting twist on the content creators.
'Cause the developers have always been, you know,
in high demand, they've always been rock stars.
You want to get people developing on your platform,
but the content creators is a very different
kind of flavor of that,
where now people are sharing their experience
and they're becoming like little mini rock stars
in their own voice and the way
that they interact with these games,
which is really an adjunct to the actual gameplay itself.
So it has been a pretty interesting growth
and you guys pioneered it early on.
But one of the other things I think is pretty interesting
in the content creator space, is the monetization.
Can these people make living,
and we know that you can't really do it on advertising,
there's really not that much advertising.
But you guys have pioneered a ton of
kind of direct monetization options and opportunities
to help these people actually make money
while they're creating this great content.
>> Yeah, so content creators on Twitch,
you know, people stream for a number of reason.
Some do it for the attention,
some do it for the money, and some do it for fame,
well they do it for the love, like the attention,
to get famous, or they do it for the money.
And so, you know, it terms of monetization,
we want to help support those
who are trying to do it for a career.
And so, at Twitch we have
the broadest means of ways to monetize,
but also the lowest barrier of entry
to take advantage of them.
And so what I mean by that is
that we have what's called our partner program.
And that's where all the best streamers want to be.
'Cause that has the most monetization options.
But we also recently introduced
what we call our affiliate program,
which is a stepping stone to partnership.
And while it doesn't have all the whistles and bells
of being a partner, it does have ways
to monetize so they can start making a living as well.
And when I talk about having the most means to monetize,
we have a whole laundry list of ways.
We have revenue share from advertising,
we have the ability to offer subscriptions to your viewers,
and while every channel is free to watch,
with subscriptions you can offer
special perks to your viewers.
You give them special emotes,
you make it so that chat is only for subscribers,
there's a lot of perks you can give your subscribers.
And our subscribers, by the way,
they know that they're supporting you
and they're all frequently proud to do so.
They enjoy supporting their kind of careers
'cause they know if they didn't support you,
you might not be streaming
and they love playing a role in keeping
their favorite creators around.
We have a program called Cheering with Bits.
And it's a little complicated to always explain,
but it's where we have Bits, which is a virtual good,
and with these goods, you put them the into chat,
you purchase these Bits, you put them in the chat,
and they become these animated emotes.
And the more you put in, the bigger the emotes get
and the more animated they get.
So the creator can see who their biggest fans are.
And that's another way they can monetize.
We have a really successful program
in partnership with Amazon called Twitch Prime.
Twitch Prime is a benefit of Amazon Prime.
So if you have Amazon Prime, all you have to do
is connect it to your Twitch account
and you can start taking advantage of all these great perks.
>> [Jeff] I haven't done that yet.
>> Yeah, and the one that benefits our Twitch Prime members,
Amazon Prime members, both of 'em, the most is that
you get a free 30 day subscription
to any content creator of your choice.
And so, the way that helps is
it's the same as if somebody were to go
hit the Sub button on that channel directly.
And so we've seen huge amount of revenue
being generated by our creators just from people
using their free 30 day subscription.
>> Well, that's great.
It's just interesting to me,
that before to pay content creators in the old media model,
they create their content, they sell advertising,
you buy some Tide, Tide gives some money to ABC,
they give it to the content creator.
But this has really opened this whole democratization
of this kind of this direct support, if you will,
of the type of content that you're interested in
without really going through the middle man.
With all these micro-payments and as you said,
all these kind of fun and different options
to compensate for 'em,
to enable just this massive explosion
of these creator types.
>> Right, but you also have the advertisers...
>> [Jeff] You still have the advertisers.
>> But what's they're doing is that,
our creators are getting a lot
of sponsorship opportunities,
they're being part of influencer programs.
We actually have a full advertising sales team
who works with brands to do what we call custom solutions,
which is where they will,
instead of just run an ad on a channel,
they will do like an activation.
For example, we work with Totino's for their pizza rolls,
where we create a bucking couch.
So we had a couch like a buffalo,
there was a content creator playing a video game on it,
and the people in chat could control it by saying
up, down, up, down, or right, left,
and they would move the couch.
>> [Jeff] Tryin' to throw 'em off the couch.
>> Because it was very in-line
with what our community enjoys,
they like the personality involved in it,
they like being able to play a part in it,
so those types of custom activations
are something that really resonate
with our community and by default,
they resonate with brands.
And there are things you can actually only do on Twitch.
We sort of pioneered this new field of advertising.
>> Interesting.
So, as we look down the road,
and I'll let you go back, I know you're super busy
and I really appreciate you takin' a few minutes.
You look at the future right,
we see these tremendous booths that are here.
Fabulous graphics, VR comin' down the pike,
we're getting ton more CPU,
and graphical chips are all over the place.
So basically, power and internet and 5G's coming,
mobility's gonna be way, way faster.
Where do you see it going?
What are some of the things that, in your vision,
as you sat around, you would love to be able to do,
but just haven't been able to?
Where do you see some of these kinda new visions
being enabled by some of this new leading-edge technology?
>> Well, I can speak in terms of where we see Twitch going,
which is, we recently introduced
a product called extensions.
And what extensions are,
they're created by outside developers
and what they are is,
they add interactive functionality
to broadcasters' channel pages.
Whether it's a widget underneath the screen
or it's an overlay that goes on top of it.
And with these overlays,
it's creating a more interactive experience for the viewers,
and that's where we see the future of gaming going,
which is that, it's not a sit-back experience,
it's a lean forward.
For example, if you're playing Hearthstone,
there's a Hearthstone extension
where you could literally click on the screen
and see what cards the person's holding.
And you know, we worked with G League,
which is that live MBA minor league system
>> [Jeff] Right, right, no longer the D League,
now the G League (laughs).
>> Yeah, and so you could actually click on the player
or find stats on the players who are on the court,
you could find stats on the league.
Where also with extensions you could do leaderboards,
you can do polls, you can do mini-games.
It's actually unlimited, the amount of creative ideas.
You could have viewers vote during an award show
on what games they think are gonna win.
We did this with the game awards last year,
where viewers would vote on what games
they thought were going to win
and then the game awards put a leaderboard
to show which communities got it closest.
>> [Jeff] Right, right.
>> So there's so much with it
and that's where we're putting a lot of attention on.
So extensions is definitely gonna be
one of the futures for spectators.
>> Right, and just overlaying all these different things
over that baseline content, over that baseline creator.
>> Yeah.
>> All right Chase, well thanks for takin' a few minutes.
I was gonna bring you a 20th anniversary tee shirt
next year, but you got two more to go (laughs).
>> There ya go, I'll have to wait.
>> All right. He's Chase, I'm Jeff.
We are at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3.
Thanks for watchin'.