Can Glimesh dethrone Twitch?
If you are a content creator, I bet you have heard about a new streaming platform called Glimesh. Glimesh officially announced their Alpha launch for March. In this article I will help you answer the question of “Should you be on it?”. Soon after Glimesh’s launch, I will release a full guide on How to Stream to Glimesh. If you are planning to stream to other platforms in the meantime, check out my Full Streaming Guide!
Is it really different?
Launching a new streaming platform in the current state of the industry presents a great challenge. Many platforms have tried to challenge Twitch and gain market share. The only platforms successfully doing so are YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming.
Glimesh is taking a different approach, by being as transparent as possible with their goals and intentions. Rather than developing a platform for the streaming community, Glimesh’s Devs’ goal is to develop a platform with the community.
Glimesh, after launch, will be an open source platform. An open source platform means that anybody can develop features for the platform, and upon approval these features will be available to everybody. Twitch, Facebook as well as YouTube are not open source platforms. All features on the platform were thought off, and coded by the platform’s teams themselves. In short, Glimesh wants to give more creative freedom to the community.
In addition to being an open source platform, Glimesh aims to eliminate restrictions. Every streamer will have the ability to earn money through paid subscriptions right at launch day. Unlike other platforms which hide this feature behind a follower or viewer wall, Glimesh will enable every streamer to earn money from his or hers first ever livestream.
If all that does not sound good already, Glimesh is bringing new technology into the industry. When live streaming on Twitch, Facebook or YouTube, there is often a delay between the streamer and the viewers. Glimesh aims to get rid of this delay as much as possible, making the interaction between streamers and their community realtime.
Will Glimesh have a chance?
As of writing this article it is impossible to say if Glimesh is going to have a real shot at taking market share from other platforms. Given their unique approach the developers tried their best to set the platform up for success. There is however a crucial factor that Glimesh is missing, large creators.
A lot of a platform’s success is tied to the largest creators on that platform. The creators pull the viewers. Unless large creators are going to swap platforms, for example from Twitch to Glimesh, I see very little success for the platform in the future. Mixer was a great example of this.
Most users of Mixer were streamers themselves. Mixer had a streamer to viewer ratio of 1:3 whereas Twitch’s ratio was 1:25. However simply buying large creators is not going to guarantee the platform’s success either, as we saw with Mixer. Mixer acquired Ninja and Shroud, two of the largest streamers on Twitch, and still it was not enough to keep the platform alive.
Time will tell if Glimesh is going to get a real shot at changing the industry in the way it appears to intend to.
Should you be on it?
As of a couple days ago, you are now able to reserve your username on Glimesh and create a profile, even able to start moving your audience over if you have one already. In my professional opinion, at the very least head over to https://glimesh.tv and reserve your username. Glimesh is a free platform and creating a profile does not cost you anything.
From what we know so far about the platform, it is going to be similar to Mixer when it comes to the community feel of the platform. As a small to medium creator, who is not bound by contract to a platform, I believe Glimesh is worth streaming on. There are tools, for example Restream or Streamlabs OBS Prime, that allow you to multistream and give Glimesh the time of day, without sacrificing your current streaming schedule on other platforms.
I am a firm believer that you only know if it is for you, if you try it.
If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me on my socials or through Streaming Live Academy.
