 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center with 68,000 of our closest friends. It's E3, it's the biggest industry event in gaming and we're pretty psyched to be here. It's our first time but our next guest has been coming. I think he said for like 19 years so really excited to invite Chase to the set, PR director from Twitch. Chase, great to see you. Yeah, great to see you too and you've oversold my time here. It's actually only been 18 years. 18 years, cause you missed one I think, right? I took a break. It was during one of the slower years and then I came back into the fold. So I just love to get your perspective with kind of looking back at how the industry has changed, how the event has changed and how gaming ecosystem has changed and the way people interact with these things. Yeah, it's interesting. E3 has definitely gone through like almost a roller coaster in terms of what it's like on the show floor. My first year in 99 was where I was working with the PR team for the Sega Dreamcast launch and we had a full stage show that every hour, every other hour we have Oolala from Space Channel 5 she would come out on stage and with a full dance troupe it would be like a vacuum. All of the attendees in E3 would all be sucked into our booth and then it would dissipate after that but every two hours it was like the wave comes, title lifts and crashing back in. Every other hour we had inline skaters and graffiti artists for Jekarine Radio. We had a second floor where a local broadcast crews could come and film the whole E3 because there's so much happening and so everywhere you went it was a bombast of noise and then in the years that followed they kept booths started getting smaller not because of the scope of the show but because they were trying to make it more industry friendly, less of a carnival ride and less of a competition of brands trying to outdo each other but let's make this more about the games than the booth babes and those things so they started, but then slowly it started building back up and it's gone through peaks and valleys so it's definitely been interesting to watch and we were talking earlier about what are some of the biggest changes I've seen and from the Twitch perspective it's seeing the validation of content creators grow. Livestreaming is a fairly new aspect to the convention space, to the convention era. I mean obviously we've been doing for about a half decade or so but in terms of the validity of the creators themselves like in the past they weren't treated as media you wouldn't see them on pre-registration lists now they're getting, we have hundreds here at E3 where every year it doubles the amount of content creators and it's not just because of E3 saying oh they're as relevant as traditional media if not more so but all the brands are leveraging them so what you'll find is a lot of live stream setups from booths, people are streaming their contents when they're doing their press conferences they bring a lot of content creators in put them in the front row because one thing I love about the content creator era is that there's people like me who I'm a hardcore gamer but I've been doing this for so long that even if I see a game I love I don't jump out of my seat going oh my gosh they've done it but when you have all these new gamers who might have been gaming for a while getting that treatment that I did traditionally there's so much more, there's so vibrant about it there's so much more excitement and that's why you know E3 is so important but it's definitely so for the content creators who traditional media might feel threatened by but I love seeing the energy they bring to the space it's such an interesting twist on the content creators because the developers have always been in high demand they've always been rock stars you want to get people developing on your platform but the content creators is a very different kind of flavor of that where now people are sharing their experience and they're becoming like little mini rock stars in the way their own voice and the way that they interact with these games which is really an adjunct to the actual gameplay itself so it has been a pretty interesting growth and you guys pioneered it early on but one of the other things I think is pretty interesting in the content creator space is the monetization right can these people make a living and we know that you can't really do it on advertising there's really not that much advertising but you guys have pioneered a ton of kind of direct monetization options and opportunities to help these people actually make money while they're creating this great content. Yeah so content creators on Twitch people stream for a number of reasons some do it for the attention some do it for the money and some do it for fame well they do it for the love like the attention to get famous or they do it for the money and so you know in terms of monetization you know we want to help support those who are trying to do it for a career and so at Twitch we have like the broadest means of ways to monetize but also the lowest barrier of entry to take advantage of them and so what I mean by that is that we have what's called our partnership program our partner program and that's where all the best streamers want to be because that is the most monetization options but we also recently introduced what we call our affiliate program which is a stepping stone to partnership and well it doesn't have all the whistles and bells of being a partner it does have ways to monetize so they can start making a living as well and when I talk about having the most means to monetize we have a whole laundry list of ways we have revenue share from advertising we have the ability to offer subscriptions to your viewers and while every channel is free to watch with subscriptions you can offer special perks to your viewers you give them special emotes you can make it so the chat is only for subscribers there's a lot of ways that you can a lot of perks you can give your subscribers and our subscribers by the way they know that they're supporting you and they're frequently proud to do so they enjoy supporting their content creators because they know if they didn't support you you might not be streaming and they love being playing a role and keeping their favorite creators around we have a program called cheering with bits and it's a little complicated to always explain but it's where we have bits which is a virtual good and with these goods you put them into chat you purchase these bits you put them into the chat and they become these animated emotes and the more you put in the bigger the emotes get and the more animated they get so the creator can see who their biggest fans are and that's another way they can monetize we have a really successful program in partnership with Amazon called Twitch Prime Twitch Prime is a benefit of Amazon Prime so if you have Amazon Prime all you have to do is connect it to your Twitch County you can start taking advantage of all these great perks the one that- I haven't done that yet yeah and the one that benefits our Twitch Prime members Amazon Prime members both of them the most is that you get a free 30 day subscription to any content creator of your choice and so the way that helps is the same as if somebody were to go and hit the sub button on that channel directly and so we've seen huge amount of revenue being generated by our creators just for people using their free 30 day subscription that's great this is so interesting to me that before to pay content creators in the old media model right they create their content they sell advertising you buy some Tide Tide gives some money to the content ABC they give it to the content creator but this has really opened this whole democratization of this kind of direct support if you will of the type of content that you're interested in without really going through the middle man with all these micro payments and as you said all these kind of fun and different options to compensate for them to enable just this massive explosion of these creator types right but it's actually but there's still you also have the advertisers and you still have the advertisers right well but what they're doing is that you know they're sponsoring creators are getting a lot of sponsorship opportunities they're being part of influencer programs we actually have a full advertising sales team who works with brands to do what we call custom solutions which is where they will instead of just running out on a channel they will do like an activation for example we work with tortinos for their pizza rolls where they create we create a bucking couch so we had a couch like a bucking like a buffalo that right so we had a there was a content creator playing a video game on it and the people in chat can control if I say up down up down or the right left and they would move the couch throw them off the couch because it was very it was very in line with what our community enjoys they like to create the personality involved in it we like being able to play a part in it you know and so those types of custom activations are something that really resonate with our community and by default they resonate with brands and the things you can actually only do on Twitch we sort of pioneered this new field of advertising interesting so as we look down the road and let you go back I know you're super busy and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes look at the future right we see these tremendous boosts that are here fabulous graphics VR coming down the pike right we're getting ton more CPU and graphical chips are all over the place so basically power and internet and 5G's coming mobility is going to be way way faster where do you see it going what are some of the things that in your vision as you sat around you would love to be able to do but just haven't been able to where do you see some of these kind of new visions being enabled by some of this new leading edge technology well I can speak in terms of where we see Twitch going which is we recently introduced a project called Extensions and what extensions are it's a developer they're created by outside developers and what they are is they add interactive functionality to broadcasters channel pages whether it's a widget underneath the screen or it's an overlay that goes on top of it and with these overlays you can it's creating a more interactive experience for the viewers and that's where we see the future of gaming going which is that it's not a it's not a sit back experience it's a lean forward for example if you're playing Hearthstone there's a Hearthstone extension where you could literally click on the screen and see what cards the person's holding and you know we worked with G-League which is the live NBA minor league system no longer the D-League now the G-League yeah and so you could actually click on the player or you know look at the find stats on the players who are on the court you could find stats on the league and we're also with extension you can do leaderboards you can do polls you can do mini games it's actually unlimited the amount of creative ideas there's you can do a you can have viewers vote on what during the award show on what games they think are going to win we did this with the game awards last year where viewers would vote on what games they thought were going to win and then the game awards put a leaderboard to show which community's got it closest right right so there's so much with it and that's where we're putting a lot of attention on so extension is definitely going to be one of the futures for spectators right it's just overlaying all these different things over that baseline content over that baseline creator alright Chase well thanks for taking a few minutes and I was going to bring you a 20th anniversary t-shirt next year but you got two more to go there you go I'll have to wait alright he's Chase I'm Jeff we are at the Los Angeles Convention Center E3 thanks for watching