Game Streaming of the Day: YouTube Launches Their Twitch Competitor

Twitch has dominated the new market of video game streaming and now YouTube wants a cut of the action.

As they announced at the beginning of the summer, YouTube has planned to launch YouTube Gaming, a separate site dedicated to streaming, watching and chatting about video games. On Aug. 26, they began a slow release of the new platform.

Mashable says the introduction is fairly painless:

Getting started is a simple process of navigating your browser over to gaming.youtube.com and following the steps in a setup process (that includes phone verification). You'll need to set up encoding software, fill out the necessary info for your stream and tick off any optional features. There's a checklist right there on the setup page, but Google also put together a more involved guide to getting set up.

YouTube Gaming supports streaming from PlayStation 4, Wii U and Xbox One consoles, provided you've got a capture device sending video from the console to your computer. Google specifically calls out Elgato's HD60 as a YouTube Live Verified device, but there's a good chance that other game capture solutions work as well. If you've got one, try it out before you run out and buy something new.

Apparently, mobile apps for Android and iOS are also around the corner so you can watch your gaming of the go.

The launch comes only a year after Google prepared a heaping ton of money to purchase Twitch, but then Amazon swooped in with $970 million and bought the streaming service.

There's no telling yet whether the search giant will have any luck in a space already dominated by Twitch and executives at the leading streamer seem to think not.

Matthew DiPietro, Twitch's SVP of Marketing released a statement Aug. 25, basically bragging about how their numbers are so much bigger:

For our current stats, we have 1.5 million broadcasters (11K Partnered channels), 100 million viewers per month who watch 106 minutes per person per day on average, and 38 million installs of our mobile app with 4.7 billion minutes watched across 10.3 million unique devices.