The 100 or so Twitch employees work to make sure the service runs smoothly, even when it's being slammed with traffic. There's the Megaton room, inspired by the wasteland of a city from Fallout 3 - it's still a work in progress. There's the Rapture room, inspired by BioShock, which is decorated with its own fake fireplace and leather armchair. To the other side are meeting rooms themed after video game locations. The company's lobby has a wall of flat-screen televisions, each displaying a bright purple and white logo, "TWITCH, TWITCH TWITCH." To one side of the office are rows of desks that seat mostly 20-somethings typing lines of code while watching video streams. The Twitch office in San Francisco's Financial District takes up a whole floor of a Bush Street building that spans half a city block. Running around after Kan at the time with battery packs, laptops and webcams - slightly frantic and full of uncertainty - the four friends had no idea their silly idea would change an industry and become the biggest and - in a way, the only - dedicated video game live-streaming service in the world. But in the midst of uncertainty, their broadcasting experiment planted the seed for something much bigger than they could have imagined. They had no idea how Kan's sometimes interesting but mostly boring video stream could support a business, or what that business was to begin with. The four friends weren't sure where their silly idea would take them. Left to right: Michael Seibel, Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt and Emmett ShearĪnd a novelty was more or less all it was, Shear later said. The four friends set out to create a new kind of entertainment - at a time when live-streaming technology was just emerging, when online video could barely run without lag and when the concept of broadcasting your life online was still novel. And when he sat on the porcelain throne, he angled the camera toward the ceiling. When he slept, he placed the camera next to himself so the world could see him. When he went for a walk, ate, read, watched a movie, went on a date or answered his email, anyone could watch. The webcam captured his daily interactions - 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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