Twitch is known for being the king of video game love streaming and is the go-to service for streaming esports, but diversification is the key to continued success. Clearly the people at Twitch understand this as the company has struck a deal with HBO to stream the premier episode of Silicon Valley, HBO’s universally claimed comedy, and will even be live streaming a chat with the cast who will be answering questions.
How do you get millennials who don’t have a cable subscription to care about HBO? Bring it to them through the trusted Trojan horse of video games, of course. Next Wednesday, April 8th, the premier episode of Silicon Valley will stream on Twitch. That’s the company that built a billion-dollar business around broadcasting gamers in action. It marks the first time any TV network has broadcast a show on Twitch. Staying true to the format, the Silicon Valley cast will kick things off with a live chat on a couch, answering questions from the crowd and showing off their joystick skills before streaming the episode and some exclusive clips. What HBO gets out of this is obvious: it’s putting its show in front of a huge new audience, roughly 100 million monthly active users. “We were initially impressed by the scale of Twitch as a platform,” said Sabrina Caluori, HBO’s vice president of digital and social media. “As we began working with them, we discovered that there’s real quality engagement in addition to huge reach — it’s rare to find both.”
