It wasn't a great experience, but I personally felt like the outage was a loud overreaction from the community. I guess that the circumstances were perfect for outrage: Facebook is not likeable, it's a big change from twitch, and Facebook paid for exclusivity. I was fine with watching the games on Facebook, and part of me wishes they succeeded so that we wouldn't have a twitch monopoly.
It was just five or six years ago when my friends and I found Twitch website unbearable. We'd always watch twitch on vlc using live streamer http://docs.livestreamer.io/
Today, we have YouTube Live and to a much smaller extent mixer. More importantly, I'm not afraid to open Twitch on a desktop web browser. What changed? The main change is reliable 60fps streaming.
If Facebook can't do 60fps on day one, it might as well not try.
I remember asking Justin tv engineers whether they thought they could break even. They said it is more than enough to show one thirty second ad every hour (as far as I remember) to keep the lights on. But then this was before Twitch partner programs. Also we were streaming from potato quality laptop webcams. Watching 240p video with 20 second latency was an ordinary miracle.
I imagine the costs are likely much higher today. But I'm curious. Did Facebook spend a billion dollars on content deals?
The community definitely overreacted, but the experience really was pretty poor. I watched it on fb (because I like the ESL production and I don't hate facebook), but I had serious connectivity and quality problems even if I have fibre. On top of this the platform is just not that great, I can't think of a single feature that was better than Twitch.
