Titanfall accounts for nearly half of Twitch members' Xbox One streaming debut

What happens when you give Xbox One owners access to Twitch? They broadcast 23 million minutes of gameplay videos — in a week.

The two companies revealed today that more than 108,000 Twitch members used Xbox One to stream video to the web in the first week after app update went live on March 10. In total, gamers on Microsoft’s console broadcasted for 23 million minutes. On the first day of availability, the Xbox One accounted for 30 percent of all streaming channels on Twitch. This is beneficial to both Microsoft and Twitch, as the Xbox company gets free word-of-mouth advertising from its community and the video streaming site gets more content to put ads in front of.

“We have always considered enabling live streaming directly from consoles to be a key step in unlocking the ability for all gamers to share their experiences,” Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear said in a statement. “Yet we never imagined the popularity would spread as fast as it has. Microsoft has really helped drive this expansion, and the great system architecture of Xbox One has allowed us to build a really great broadcasting experience with a robust feature set. We’re all very excited about working with Microsoft to continue rolling out new features on the platform.”

As you might expect, the sci-fi shooter Titanfall is the Xbox One’s most popular game to broadcast. It made up more than 10 million of 23 million minutes of video streamed from Xbox Ones around the world. The average Twitch sessions on Xbox One last for about 28 minutes.

The livestreaming site has 45 million unique viewers on a monthly basis, and the typical viewer watches in spurts that last for multiple hours. Having more content from more sources enables Twitch to close bigger and bigger deals with advertising partners. For example, movie studio Lions Gate Films recently sponsored a major gaming tournament on Twitch to promote the release of its film Ender’s Game, and Twitch would likely hope to continue building on that.

Prior to launching the broadcast feature on its Twitch app, Microsoft relied on its GameDVR service. That software enables players to record up to the last five minutes of gameplay to edit, voice, and share with others using the Upload Studio program on Xbox One or Microsoft’s cloud storage site One Drive.

Microsoft delayed its Twitch video-streaming integration, which it originally planned to launch alongside the system in November, so that it could ensure a quality product.

“Microsoft has a put a lot of time and effort into ensuring their Twitch integration would be a robust experience, and based on the amount of Xbox One owners streaming from their living rooms, the move paid off,” Twitch chief operation officer Kevin Lin said. “This high rate of adoption for our console integrations has elevated our role in the entertainment industry. People go to Hulu to watch TV, Netflix to watch movies, and now they go to Twitch to watch and broadcast video games. We’re really fortunate for such a passionate and progressive community who made this all possible.”

Sony, meanwhile, offered gameplay livestreaming on day one of the PlayStation 4’s Nov. 15 launch. Since then, over 200,000 unique broadcasters have beamed live gameplay to Twitch using the PS4