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Sony's latest console continues to eat up Twitch broadcasting bandwidth, though the average viewership of any given PS4 stream is still far below the audience commanded by top PC streamers.

Alex Wawro, Contributor

January 7, 2014

1 Min Read

Newsbrief: Sony's latest console continues to gain popularity as a livestreaming platform -- Twitch announced today that nearly 20% of their broadcasts during the recent holiday break came from PlayStation 4 consoles. That's a significant jump when you consider that Sony's new box accounted for roughly 10% of all Twitch broadcasts in early December. Just a few weeks later -- December 23, 2013 and January 3rd, 2014, to be exact -- 1 in 5 Twitch livestreams came from PlayStation 4 consoles. Given that Sony recently announced the PlayStation 4 sold more than 4.2 million units in 2013 -- roughly double the 2.1 million sold by early December -- it seems like the uptick in console livestreaming on Twitch is due at least in part to new console owners messing around with the PlayStation 4's built-in streaming functions, rather than established streamers migrating to the console. A quick glance at the Twitch website bears this out: while the top five active streaming channels across all platforms often have between 5,000 - 70,000 viewers each, the top five PlayStation 4 channels average 50-90 viewers at a time. Still, if you're working on a game for Sony's next console it's probably worth thinking about how to make it better to stream -- both for the players and the viewers.

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