Update: It appears that Twitch has capped views to ten per IP. While this method still works, you’ll need to supplement it with proxies or multiple IP’s. It’s still a good read though 🙂
An intro to Twitch:
Twitch is the largest video game broadcasting community. Most professional gamers live stream onto Twitch and almost every major eSporting event is broadcast through Twitch. There are hundreds of thousands of fans at any given time, all watching live streams.
Since there are hundreds of broadcasters simultaneously streaming, only the top broadcasters get featured on the first page of the channel browser. This position is determined by the number of live viewers watching the live stream. As you can see in the picture below, if you are not ranked in the top 7, you get put in the ominous “View All” button.
In most cases, only the well known broadcasters (usually pro-gamers with large fan bases) are featured on the front page, with all the others hidden away. Because of this, it is extremely hard for new streamers to get their content featured and get more fans. This is a huge catch-22, but according to Twitch, it’s the best way to ensure that only good content gets displayed.
Reverse Engineering Twitch’s View Counter
Although I do not personally play video games or broadcast on Twitch, I wanted to see if there was a way to fake the number of live viewers on a stream in order to be featured on the front page.
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