Twitch beats out ESPN, WWE, and MLB as largest live-streaming site in the US

Based on a new report from Qwilt, a video delivery and analytics company, Twitch is by far the leading live-streaming site in the United States, coming in at over 43% for all live-streaming traffic by volume. This is more than ESPN, Major League Baseball, and the WWE combined.

"It has not been the case to see a live-stream site sustain such traffic that Twitch has, it's been extraordinary", Qwilt's VP of Marketing and Business Development Mark Fisher told GameSpot's esports portal onGamers. "What we've seen before is most live-streaming sites hitting large spike around large events. Twitch has been the first to keep consistent traffic even without the big events."

In January, Twitch released released its own internal metrics totaling 45 million unique viewers and over one million broadcasters a month for 2013. In February the Wall Street Journal reported that Twitch was fourth in total US peak traffic behind Netflix, Google, and Apple. Earlier this month, Newzoo and Super Data Research put out their own findings saying that over 70 million people watch esports worldwide.

OnGamers asked Fisher how Qwilt obtained their numbers: "We have systems running inside network operators. To be clear, they are US broadband subscribers that we are measuring and those systems are across the US," he said. "Unlike some other measurement systems, we measure the volume of traffic over the period of measurement. For this study of live-streaming sites which included Twitch, it was the week of April 7th."

Fisher would not disclose which specific broadband providers were included in the report, but said a broad variety of ISPs were used. "The metric we used is a little different than others report", he said. "We think it's the most relevant metric because its the best gauge of true consumer engagement as TV viewers move online."

Qwilt predicts video will comprise 80-90% of all global Internet traffic by 2017.

Twitch's authority in general video consumption in the United States is much lower at 1.5%, with Internet giants Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Hulu ahead.