Funny enough, I'm watching a Starcraft II channel on Twitch just now, while reading HN. I don't play <i>any</i> games, not even the smallest, but I watch - although only caster streams, not player streams. Tastosis FTW :)<p>I have a cable subscription as part of my apartment package - but I don't use it. I don't even have a TV. Internet and streaming <i>only</i>. I find that if I had TV I'd be much more passive and watch too much, now I watch SC2 but not as much as if I had TV. I spend a lot more time with edX and Coursera and watch lecture videos instead. If I had a TV it would be much harder to turn it off than a game stream. I like the smaller communities, watching a TV production I am much more of a passive anonymous consumer than even a (very big) 50,000 viewer stream on Twitch, and even though Twitch chat is notorious, at least it exists. And a lot of streamers and casters react to what is going on in chat at least sometimes, in traditional media I am much farther removed from the makers.<p>Of various streaming services I tried watching Twitch in the end provided the consistently best experience, these days up to 1080p60. That alone is not sufficient to know how much data is flowing though, the data rate can be very different even for streams with the same resolution and frame rate, so with the same advertised resolution one channel can be much more crisp than another one, but some people may experience occasional buffering issues.<p>I just checked, currently there are about 650,000 viewers total on Twitch, rough estimate just to get an idea of order of magnitude. More stats: <a href="https://www.quantcast.com/twitch.tv#trafficCard" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantcast.com/twitch.tv#trafficCard</a><p>You can change the period on the right, the earliest to set "From" to is 23 March, 2012, to get a view of how Twitch's viewers develop(ed) over time. When I look at the last 365 days it looks pretty flat. I'm not sure about the data though, for some reason the "Rest of the world" (other than USA) is pretty much gone from one day to the next beginning of 2016. Does anyone have an explanation? I doubt that the "rest of the world" stopped watching Twitch overnight.<p>Looking at <a href="https://stats.twitchapps.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stats.twitchapps.com/</a> it's the same result though - no real growth any more for at least the last 12 months. Unless that's based on the same data, I don't know.