Smashcast

» see smashcast.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in 2017 i was watching the occasional twitch stream like everyone else. smashcast was the place i had heard of but never visited. by then the streaming-service map was already drawn. twitch had won the open category back in 2014 when amazon bought it for almost a billion dollars. youtube gaming was launching its own competitor. anything else in the space was a niche bet on whether twitch could be unseated, and the answer to that question kept being no.

hitbox was the older half of the merger. it launched in october 2013 out of vienna by a small team that wanted a more streamer-friendly platform with lower-latency video. azubu came earlier, founded in 2012 by lars windhorst after watching kids stream league of legends matches to each other and reading the math on esports as a sport. by 2015 both companies were in trouble. azubu's exclusive-streamer model was expensive without enough viewers to justify it. hitbox had a steady user base but no path to scale against twitch.

the merger was announced in january 2017 and the smashcast brand went live on may 5. hitbox.tv redirected to smashcast.tv overnight. the promised story was a combined service that could pay creators better than twitch and serve esports better than youtube. that story never produced numbers anyone external could verify. some hitbox investors later said the post-merger payments from azubu were delayed or missing. the platform stayed alive through 2018 and 2019 with diminishing press coverage. on november 20, 2020 it went offline without a long farewell post.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the technical case for hitbox in 2013 was real. lower latency between streamer and chat, with better quality for the same bandwidth. that ratio was something a serious gamer could feel. for esports it mattered more, because viewers want to react with the audience and not two seconds behind everyone else. the strategic case was harder. twitch already had the streamer network effect. moving to hitbox meant your existing audience had to follow you to a smaller platform with a worse discovery system. most streamers did not make the move.

~ what really happened ~

the smashcast shutdown in november 2020 came in the same year that microsoft killed mixer. mixer had paid ninja and shroud millions of dollars to leave twitch and still failed to move the market. once mixer went down, the question of whether twitch could be unseated had its definitive answer for the decade. smashcast did not need a dramatic ending. it just stopped, with most of its remaining users probably already streaming somewhere else.

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