Is it true that Twitch took viewers away?

Last weekend, Ibai once again made history with La Velada III, an event that broke all live internet streaming records; according to Twitch, the 3.4 million users connected at the same time have been exceeded, a peak that greatly exceeds the previous record of 3.35 million audience.

But such a feat did not come without problems. Although from the start it was obvious that La Velada III was going to be an unprecedented success, with more than one and a half million users logging on as soon as the broadcast began, the program struggled to continue accelerating after this initial thrust; to the point that Antonio ‘Reven’ Pino had to encourage viewers to open the show with their mobile phonesto add enough users to break the record.

However, it’s not that La Velada III has received less attention, quite the contrary; and it’s that the real reason Ibai had hearing issues was on Twitch itself. From the start, the platform had serious difficulties in responding to the incredible demand

The Twitch ‘robbery’ in Ibai

The controversy began with an overly curious detail: the maximum audience for La Velada III was 3,499,999 spectators. It’s a peak, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that many people saw the event in its entirety; According to Twitch’s own tools, the average viewership was 2,893,443 users. However, the maximum figure is mysterious to say the least; It’s a bit of an odd number, and one that has sparked conspiracy theories on social media.

It is true that 3,499,999 viewers is a very rare number, although it is entirely possible; It feels like it was left behind by 3.5 million users for some weird reason. One possible explanation is that Twitch has a “hard” limit of 3.5 million users in a single issue; in other words, that even Amazon executives did not expect such success. It can be a security measure against possible “bot” attacks or simply that the Twitch servers do not allow more.

And indeed, other data indicate that the actual figure was much higher at this; Ibai himself shared a tweet in which some users claim to have momentarily seen the figure of 5.4 million viewers. If true, that would be a record that will likely be unrepeatable for the vast majority of streamers…not counting Ibai, of course.

In the absence of official confirmation from Twitch, everything indicates that it is an error on the part of the streaming service; the key seems to be in how Twitch counts users, which has caused some controversy in the past. While the exact details are a company secret, it’s clear that Twitch counts users in a different way than YouTube, for example. But more important is how these numbers are reported.

According to one of the largest analytics organizations, Flow charts, the problem is with the Twitch API, the developer toolkit that provides access to some of your data, including the number of users on a stream. We know that Twitch sometimes report duplicate data, which translate to “lines” in graphs indicating the number of users; In other words, in situations where Twitch is close to the limit of its capacity, it is not able to show accurate data and again reports the last recorded data, in this case 3,499,999 users.

It is therefore perfectly possible that Ibai exceeded this figure, but we’ll probably never know, unless Twitch itself explains what happened and shows the real numbers. At least, it seems that Ibai took these problems with philosophy, and that he will try again to beat his own record. When the day comes, Twitch had better prepare more servers.

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