So Twitch is 100% live content. If the technology were easy to replicate and the talent/streamers went elsewhere, Twitch would have nothing?

Twitch has the audience. For that reason the talent and streamers won't go elsewhere. Unless you offer them a sweetheart deal - which other streaming services have in the past - but none of those deals have worked out favorably for those streaming services.

Exactly this. A streamer's audience is only "their" audience the way that say the audience for Game of Thrones was "their" audience. It's a very, very long tail.

Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

> Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

Microsoft tried with Mixer, they poached some Twitch stars and shutdown earlier this year. those stars just returned to Twitch.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-07/microsoft...

> And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

We'll see what happens after the impending antitrust litigation I suppose.