6 ms·

why would people pay to watch? and a 45% platform fee? that's highway robbery.

• zengouu 6y ago
  That's a great question and thanks for asking People around the world are paying to watch broadcasts: UFC fights on PPV, online courses for coding, premium sports coaching content etc. so based on that I believe there is a paying audience there. Of course, like everything, that's just a hunch and needs to be validated so your point is valid. Then there is the 45% platform fee. To be honest, at the moment it's a rough calculation based on costs of running a live streaming platform. Financially to make the platform make any sense, the costs it has to cover are following: - Payments with Stripe (or similar) - Live streaming (bandwidth, live encoding, CDN for stream delivery) - Website hosting For reference, Twitch.tv, probably the most widely known streaming platform takes a 50% "platform fee" (from subscription) even though they are owned by Amazon and probably have direct access to Amazon hosting infrastructure. The funny thing about live streaming cost is that the more viewers a stream has, the cheaper it actually is to provide. So when things scale up, price goes down. So in the long run, it would be possible to lower the platform fee. But in general, I agree with you that the costs have to come down. That could mean things like lower pricing to bigger streamers etc.