If YouTube is the go-to site for free, recorded video, Twitch is its equivalent for live-streaming. Owned by Amazon, Twitch is the go-to site for live streamers in the burgeoning eSports market. But Microsoft doesn’t want to be left behind; Mixer is their competitive product. Two of the biggest eSports streamers are Ninja and Shroud (an average of about 25,000 people tune in to Shroud’s broadcasts to … watch him play random games). Estimates indicate that Microsoft signed contracts with them for three-year terms at $6–8 million per year. Those numbers may seem outrageous, given how few people are watching the streams, but star-power matters, and these sites are already huge. Twitch has almost 4 million monthly unique streamers and an average of almost 1.3 million concurrent streamers (yes, at any give point in time, there are over a million people out there playing video games and streaming it online for you to watch). This is already big business, and all signs indicate it’s going to get much bigger, so it makes sense for Microsoft to get some stars onto their (relatively unknown) platform.