Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. Ibai LLanos


Ibai Llanos y Gerard Piqué han liderado un evento donde 31 hombres y una mujer de diferentes países compiten para ganar el Mundial de Globos. ¿Cómo se ha convertido un vídeo viral de un juego casero en un evento mediático que ha congregado a marcas y a miles de personas?

El evento contó con el apoyo de numerosas marcas comerciales y los datos de audiencia son bastante llamativos: la emisión de Twitch asciende en estos momentos a más de 8,5 millones de visualizaciones y casi 500.000 espectadores de media durante todo el streaming. El peruano Francesco de la Cruz se impuso en la final al alemán Jan Spiess. El presidente de Perú felicitó por Twitter al ganador. La cuenta de los JJOO en español también se hizo eco. Y hasta la BBC ha publicado un artículo sobre el tema. Un éxito.

Everything changed with the pandemic. As Spain went into lockdown, its population cloistered at home, Llanos saw his viewership figures explode: His Twitch channel currently commands 7.8 million followers, making him one of the 10 most followed creators on the platform. His YouTube account attracts a similar audience.

The players’ motivation is perhaps a little more calculating than that. “Twitch is the Generation Z platform,” said Julian Aquilina, a broadcasting specialist at the media research firm Enders Analysis. “It skews very young, and quite male. It is quite a different audience to traditional broadcasters.” Llanos offers a precious route into that audience: His interview with Dybala, for example, attracted more than 100,000 live, largely teenage viewers.

It is an approach, Aquilina said, that may become more common. “Twitch is becoming a broadcaster,” he said. “Amazon has done that with some N.F.L. games, putting them on Twitch as well as Prime. If you have the rights to something, you want it distributed across platforms: You can sell the broadcast rights but still have an online presence.”