Dan Clancy’s “The Live Streaming Economy” @ SXSW London 2025
Tom Ellis (TJEphotos/FEATS)
Dan Clancy Spoke at SXSW London for the first time on Monday, giving a talk titled “The Live Streaming Economy”, in which he introduced what Live streaming is, he talked the audience through the history of Twitch & their early Success, and ultimately spoke about where he see’s the Live streaming world going.
Here’s our main takeaways
In June 2011, Twitch.tv started as “JustinTV”, where Justin, Ken & several other early-day streamers would frequently turn on a camera and stream themselves doing various day-to-day activities.
Tom Ellis (TJEphotos/FEATS)
In July 2010, StarCraft 2 Released to critical acclaim, the CEO of JustinTV at the time, Emmet Sheer decided to pivot, renaming the company to “Twitch” and exclusively allowing gaming related content, even going as far to implement a “20 minutes policy”, in which anyone that streams anything other than gaming related content for more than 20 minutes would be banned from the site. Dan explained how actions like this, a clear focus on gaming related content, helped to build Twitch into what it is today, creating a strong brand image too.
Dan then went on to talk about how the platform has changed over time, in the years following Twitch’s push for gaming related content the platform has started adding more and more categories, he described streamers like Kai Cenat “going full circle”, meaning that instead of having specific gaming related content, they’ve built a career around just being live & entertaining on the platform, with 10,000’s of viewers a day tuning in to witness their streamer, describing streamers “Leaning into Twitch (to) connect directly with their community”.
Tom Ellis (TJEphotos/FEATS)
Similarly Dan highlighted artists like Lizzo, who launched her latest album whilst live on twitch, feeding back that she enjoyed having that “instant feedback” - in the same vein, Dan talked about DJ’s on twitch, one of the most viewed categories on the platform, he said “DJ’s are about building a community”, which was why it fit so well on a community focused platform. He didn’t mention it in the talk, but Dan Clancy actually streams on Twitch too, often performing DJ sets or live music covers (@DJClancy999 on Twitch).
To conclude his talk he spoke about the future of Twitch & Live streaming in general, he briefly spoke about the use of AI & how he believes that “Technology provides tools to produce content” for creators, describing a Vtuber which was powered by Ai, trained to produce content based off a specific creators style.
He also briefly spoke about short-form content, saying “TikTok did to YouTube, What YouTube did to TV”, highlighting the disruptive nature that short-form content has forced its way into the mainstream, but highlighting the adaptability that content must have to perform well, the industry is everchanging meaning creators’ content should too.
By the end of Dan’s talk, I was left with one big question, “If TikTok did to YouTube, what YouTube did to TV, where does Twitch & Long form Live Streaming content fit in with that?”.
