Livestream Video Statistics

Key takeaways

1. CNNIC counted 833 million live-streaming users in mainland China in December 2024, 75.2% of internet users, up from 617 million four years earlier. (CNNIC) See details
2. Netflix's Paul vs. Tyson broadcast in November 2024 peaked at 65 million concurrent streams and averaged 108 million viewers: two different measures of one event. (Netflix) See details
3. Twitch says viewers watched more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content on it between January 1 and September 1, 2026. (Twitch) See details
4. Twitch's own yearly minutes-watched figure shows no clear growth from 2021 to 2023: 1.3 trillion for 2021 and over 1.3 trillion for the year to September 2023. (Twitch) See details
5. Twitch keeps past broadcasts for 14 days for Affiliates and 60 days for Partners; Facebook and TikTok keep live replays for 30 days. (Twitch; Meta; TikTok) See details
6. YouTube archives a live stream automatically only if it runs less than 12 hours. (YouTube) See details
7. In 2014 Twitch said 80% of its storage held past broadcasts that were never watched, and that Highlights got 9x the views of past broadcasts. (Twitch) See details
8. In Korea, 19% of people in the Korea Media Panel watched replays of individual streamers' broadcasts in 2024, against 10% who watched them live. (KISDI) See details
9. Twitch Partner Plus streamers get a 70/30 split of net subscription revenue, against the standard 50/50. (Twitch) See details
10. YouTube recommends 17 Mbps for a 1080p60 stream in H.264; Twitch's 1080p recommendation is 7.5 Mbps. (YouTube; Twitch) See details
11. Facebook's '3x longer' figure compared live videos while live with videos that were no longer live, not with pre-recorded video. (Facebook, 2016) See details
12. 'Twitch has 140 million monthly users' is a 2018 ad-sales figure; Twitch's own current figure is 105 million monthly visitors. (Twitch) See details

How big is Twitch?

Twitch says viewers watched more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content on it between January 1 and September 1, 2026, in its State of Gaming 2026 report. That figure covers gaming only and eight months only, so it cannot be set against Twitch's older platform-wide totals, which count minutes of all content over a year.

Every Twitch scale figure comes from Twitch itself: its blog, its year-in-review posts and its advertising site. None is audited and none comes with a method. The table puts them in date order.

By Twitch's own numbers, yearly minutes watched rose about 4.5 times between 2016 and 2023 (our calculation). Twitch's headline figure was the same for 2021 and 2023, 1.3 trillion minutes for 2021 and over 1.3 trillion for the year to September 2023, so its own numbers show no clear growth between the two years. Its monthly streamer count was 8 million for 2021 and 7 million in 2023, though the two figures are worded differently ("unique streamers go live every month" against "monthly individual streamers"), so read that as a direction, not a precise fall.

Survey data on who uses Twitch is thin. Pew Research Center asks U.S. teens aged 13 to 17: 20% said they used Twitch in April and May 2022 (Pew, Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022), and 17% in September and October 2023 (Pew, 2023). In the 2023 survey, 22% of teen boys used it against 11% of teen girls (Pew).

How many people watch the biggest live streams?

The highest peak any platform on this page reports is Netflix's: its live broadcast of Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson on November 15, 2024 peaked at 65 million concurrent streams worldwide, by Netflix's own count. Most of the largest figures platforms have published are for live sports, and each platform reports them with a different measure.

Do not rank these rows against each other. A peak concurrent stream count is the most devices playing at one moment, and one stream can have several people in front of it. An average minute audience is the average number of people watching across the whole broadcast, usually estimated by a panel. Unduplicated reach counts everyone who watched at least a minute. The same event gives very different numbers under each: Paul vs. Tyson peaked at 65 million streams but averaged 108 million viewers. Several of these figures are also the platform's own, not independent measurement; the right-hand column says whose they are.

How many people watch live streams?

The largest official count is China's. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a state-affiliated statistics body, says 833 million internet users in mainland China, 75.2% of the total, had used live streaming as of December 2024 (CNNIC, 55th Statistical Report). CNNIC reports the count twice a year from a sample survey, and it has also reported how many of those users watched live streams that sell products.

That is 35% growth in four years (our calculation). Growth has slowed: CNNIC says the December 2024 total was 17.37 million higher than a year earlier, the smallest rise in the five reports. In December 2023, about 73.2% of China's live-streaming users had watched an e-commerce live stream (our calculation). CNNIC's English translations of the shopping category change between editions ("livestream e-commerce", "live commerce", "e-commerce live streaming").

Other official figures are much smaller, partly because they measure something narrower:

• Japan. 6.6% of a nationwide sample of all ages used a live-streaming video-sharing service such as Niconico Live or TwitCasting in fiscal 2024, against far higher use of on-demand video-sharing services (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). The ministry's reports changed sample between editions, so do not compare the years.
• South Korea. 10% of people in the government-run Korea Media Panel watched individual streamers' broadcasts live in 2024, up from 0.4% in 2017, according to the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI).
• Canada. 17% of Canadian internet users aged 15 and over watched streamed or live-streamed sports in 2020, a category that mixes live and on-demand (Statistics Canada, Canadian Internet Use Survey).
• United States. 27% of U.S. adults watched religious services on screens in November 2022, online or on TV, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
• United Kingdom. We found no Ofcom figure for the share of UK adults who watch live streams that we could verify. Its 2025 Online Nation report does show where live streams sit in children's online risks: of children aged 11 to 17 who had come across content harmful to children in the past four weeks, 12% said they saw it while watching a live stream (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).

The platforms' own totals are dated. Mark Zuckerberg said in April 2020, during pandemic lockdowns, that more than 800 million daily actives were engaging with livestreams every day across Facebook's apps (Facebook Q1 2020 earnings call); Meta has not updated the figure. TikTok says its LIVE Fest 2024 event gathered almost 6 million creators and 477 million viewers (TikTok newsroom). In U.S. live shopping, TikTok says sellers and creators hosted over 760,000 livestream sessions during its 2025 Black Friday to Cyber Monday campaign (TikTok newsroom).

What does it take to go live on each platform?

YouTube requires streamers to be at least 16 years old and, to stream from a phone, to have at least 50 subscribers; TikTok requires users to be 18 or older to go LIVE (YouTube Help, TikTok Support). The table lists the numeric rules each platform publishes. Rules were read in September 2026 and change often.

Anyone can go live on Twitch; the thresholds above are for the Affiliate program, which unlocks subscriptions and Bits. Twitch lowered them in June 2026. Before that, Affiliates needed 8 hours on 7 different days, an average of 3 concurrent viewers and 50 followers (Twitch blog). TikTok is often said to require 1,000 followers to go LIVE, but no TikTok page we could read states a follower minimum, so we treat that number as unconfirmed.

How long can a live stream run, and at what quality?

YouTube recommends 17 Mbps for a 1080p stream at 60 frames per second encoded in H.264, and accepts streams up to 4K / 2160p at up to 60 fps (YouTube Help, live encoder settings). For AV1 and H.265 the same page recommends 12 Mbps at 1080p60, with a 4 Mbps minimum. Twitch raised its recommended 1080p bitrate to 7.5 Mbps in June 2026, when it opened 1440p streaming to all Partners and Affiliates through Enhanced Broadcasting (Twitch blog).

Latency is the other setting that matters for interaction. YouTube says most viewers of a low-latency stream see a delay of less than 10 seconds, and of an ultra-low-latency stream less than 5 seconds (YouTube Help). Meta's Facebook live specifications are from a 2020 capture of its business help page; the live page no longer serves to automated requests, so check it before relying on the numbers.

What happens to a live stream after it ends?

Most platforms delete the recording after a set time. Twitch keeps past broadcasts for 14 days for Affiliates and 60 days for Partners (Twitch Partner Program), and Facebook and TikTok keep live replays for 30 days. YouTube is the exception: it archives a stream automatically if it runs less than 12 hours, and its help page states no expiry for that archive (YouTube Help).

Twitch's help center renders only with JavaScript, even in the Internet Archive, so we read its two most-repeated rules in a browser on September 28, 2026: the 7-day period for past broadcasts on accounts that are neither Affiliates nor Partners, and the 100-hour storage limit across all Highlights and Uploads, reported from April 2025. Instagram's help pages for live archives would not load either; Instagram announced in October 2020 that live videos are kept in a Live Archive for 30 days after they end (9to5Mac, quoting Instagram).

Twitch recordings have long been short-lived. Before August 6, 2014, it saved past broadcasts for only 3 days unless the streamer chose to save them forever. That month Twitch also began scanning recordings for copyrighted music in 30 minute blocks and muting the parts where it found some (Twitch blog, August 2014). Under that system, the recording of a stream that played copyrighted music could come back partly silent.

Do people watch live streams after they end?

Few platforms publish it. The clearest official figure is Korea's: in 2024, 19% of people in the Korea Media Panel watched or listened to replays of individual streamers' broadcasts, up from 1% in 2017, against 10% who watched them live (KISDI). Replay use was 1.9 times live viewing that year (our calculation).

Twitch's own data points the same way for edited clips over raw recordings. When it cut past-broadcast storage in 2014, Twitch said 80% of its storage capacity was filled with past broadcasts that were never watched, and that over their lifetime Highlights got 9x as many views as past broadcasts (Twitch blog, August 2014). Twitch has not published those figures since, so they describe the platform in 2014.

Facebook's 2016 data pointed the other way for its own platform. It said in March 2016 that people spent more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video while it was live than watching a video that was no longer live. That is the origin of a popular statistic that is usually misquoted; see the next section.

How are live streamers paid?

On Twitch the standard split of net subscription revenue is 50/50 between streamer and Twitch, Twitch's president wrote in September 2022 (Twitch blog). Since October 1, 2023 (announced June 15, 2023), streamers who qualify for Partner Plus get 70/30 (Twitch blog), which means keeping 40% more of each subscription's net revenue (our calculation).

• Partner Plus first applied for 12 months and up to US$100k of net subscription revenue. On January 24, 2024 Twitch removed the US$100k cap with immediate effect and lowered the qualifying threshold from 350 to 300 Plus Points from May 1, 2024 (Twitch blog).
• Since June 2022 Twitch has paid creators in its Ads Incentive Program 55% of the revenue for each ad that runs on their stream, and since August 2022 Affiliates who run at least three minutes of ads an hour (Twitch blog).
• Partners receive 1 cent for each Bit viewers use to cheer for them (Twitch Partner Program).

YouTube's live payment feature is Super Chat, where viewers pay to highlight a message in the chat. Its last published figures are from July 2019: over 90,000 channels had received Super Chats, and it was the number one revenue stream for nearly 20,000 channels (YouTube Official Blog). TikTok publishes no total for LIVE gifts, and we found no TikTok or ByteDance source for the gift-revenue totals that circulate online.

What the popular livestream numbers really say

Most live video statistics in circulation come from roundups that copy each other. We traced the most repeated ones to the earliest document we could date. Most are several years old, several measure something narrower than they are quoted for, and most were published by companies selling live video.

"80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog"

This comes from a survey run by Livestream, a company that sold live-streaming software, with New York Magazine in late 2016. Livestream's first mention, on December 14, 2016, described a survey "with New York Magazine readers and on social media" and reported that 81% of respondents watched more live video in 2016 than the year before, and 67% said watching a live event inspired them to buy tickets to a similar event (Livestream blog, archived). Two days later, Livestream's "62 Must-Know Live Video Statistics" paired the two famous figures: 80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts (Livestream blog, archived).

Livestream described the sample differently each time. Its March 2017 write-up repeated the 80% figure (Livestream blog, archived) and said it had received over 1,000 responses from "marketers, educators, government employees, church leaders, and more". Its infographic says Livestream and New York Magazine "reached out to 1,000 adults" (Livestream infographic PDF, archived). Contacting 1,000 adults and receiving over 1,000 responses from professionals are not the same survey description. The ticket figure changed too: the write-up says 67% of those who watched a livestream "purchased a ticket to a similar event the next time it occurred", a purchase rather than an inspiration. We found no publication of the survey by New York Magazine.

Every figure Livestream published from this survey is below, so a page citing any one of them can see what it rests on. All of them describe the same self-selected group of over 1,000 respondents, not live-video audiences in general.

Roundups have since widened it. One statistics page, marked "fact checked", states that 80% "of live stream viewers prefer watching live content over reading articles", dropping the brand, the vendor and the date (Zippia). What to cite instead: nothing from this survey as a measure of audiences. It was a vendor's self-selected poll with no published method. For how many people watch live streams, use the government counts above.

"People spend 3x longer watching live video than pre-recorded video"

Facebook said on March 1, 2016 that people spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video while it is live "compared to a video that's no longer live" (Facebook newsroom). It compared the same kind of broadcast live and as a replay, not live video with produced video. Six weeks later a marketing trade site restated it as 3x longer "compared to a video that's pre-recorded" (Social Media Today, April 10, 2016), and that wording is the one most roundups copy.

Two related Facebook figures travel with it. On April 6, 2016 Facebook said that "from initial data" people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos (Facebook newsroom). In January 2018 it said live videos get on average six times as many interactions as regular videos (Facebook newsroom). None came with a method, and Meta has not updated any of them. What to cite instead: quote Facebook's own wording with its date, and say it describes Facebook in 2016 to 2018.

"LinkedIn Live gets 7x more reactions and 24x more comments"

LinkedIn first said it on August 20, 2019, while LinkedIn Live was in beta: broadcasters were "seeing 7x more reactions and 24x more comments on average for live streams compared to regular video" (LinkedIn Marketing Blog). In March 2020 LinkedIn restated it against "standard native video on the platform", with 7x the reactions (LinkedIn Marketing Blog). Its marketing guide still says live video generates 24x more comments than regular video (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions). LinkedIn has never published a sample, a period or a method for it. What to cite instead: LinkedIn's claim, attributed to LinkedIn, with the 2019 beta date.

"Live video is 17% of internet traffic"

This is a forecast, not a measurement, and it was about video traffic, not all traffic. Cisco's Visual Networking Index, published in November 2018, forecast that live internet video would account for 17 percent of internet video traffic by 2022 (Cisco VNI Forecast, archived). The same report forecast that IP video would be 82 percent of all IP traffic by 2022, up from 75 percent in 2017. A roundup now states that "live streaming now constitutes 17% of all internet traffic", in the present tense (Zippia). We found no later Cisco measurement of live video's share. What to cite instead: Cisco's forecast, labelled as a 2018 forecast for 2022.

"Twitch has 140 million monthly users" and "viewers watch 95 minutes a day"

Both come from Twitch's own advertising site in mid-2018. It listed 140mm+ unique monthly viewers (Twitch advertising site, July 2018 capture) and said its 15 million daily active viewers each spend an average of 95 minutes a day watching live gaming (same page). The 95 minutes is per daily active viewer, not per visitor. By 2023 a roundup was saying Twitch "currently has 140 million monthly active users" (BankMyCell), turning a 2018 ad-sales figure into a current one. What to cite instead: Twitch's current advertising site, which gives 105 million monthly visitors, or its 31 million average daily visitors for 2021. Both are Twitch's own ad-sales figures without a published method.

"Viewers spend 8x longer with live video than on-demand"

The comparison comes from Ooyala, a video platform company, whose index for the fourth quarter of 2013 found that viewers watched on average more than 42 minutes of live video per play on connected TVs, and nearly 35 minutes per play on PCs (Ooyala press release, archived). Livestream's December 2016 list turned the connected-TV numbers into a general rule, "viewers spend 8x longer with live video than on-demand", and credited it to Tubular Insights rather than Ooyala (Livestream blog, archived). What to cite instead: Ooyala's per-play figures, labelled as connected TVs in late 2013.

The device decides the multiplier. In the chart behind those numbers (Ooyala Global Video Index Q4 2013, page 7, third-party copy), live plays averaged 42.8 minutes against 5.1 for on-demand on connected TVs, which is the 8x, and 34.5 against 2.6 on desktops, but 7.1 against 4.1 on tablets and 3.5 against 2.8 on phones. ReelSEO, which later became Tubular Insights, reported the connected-TV figures with that device caveat in April 2014; that article address now redirects to the Tubular Labs home page, so lists that credit Tubular for "8x" point to nothing. Read per device, on phones live plays ran about a quarter longer.

"The live streaming market will be worth billions by 2030"

Market-size forecasts for live streaming come from market-research resellers. None of the ones we checked publishes its method outside a paid report, and their estimates for the same year disagree widely. This page cites none of them.

Two of the most-linked figures are not live streaming forecasts at all. In February 2017 the influencer marketing agency Mediakix opened its "live streaming statistics" list with $70.05 billion by 2021; its own text gave $70.5 billion, credited to the reseller Research and Markets, for the whole video streaming market, which it put at $30.29 billion in 2016 (Internet Archive capture, February 2017). A February 2019 update swapped in $124.6 billion by 2025 from Grand View Research, again for video streaming overall, and the post still gave it in January 2022 (January 2022 capture). Pages still quote both as the size of the live streaming industry. mediakix.com no longer loads, so those links now fail.

Every popular claim our research pages trace, 816 in all, is on one page: popular video statistics, fact-checked.

How we built this page

We started from the questions people search for about livestream video statistics and looked for the organization that actually produced each answer. Every figure on this page sits in an evidence ledger with its source, the exact table or paragraph it came from, the measurement period, the population measured, and the date we checked it. This edition holds 152 figures from 24 publishers.

On September 23, 2026, every figure then on the page was re-fetched from its source on a cleared cache and matched against the recorded wording; all 122 sourced figures re-verified automatically. Pages that block automated requests or no longer exist, including Twitch's blog, Ofcom, Meta's business help pages, TikTok's Help Center, Cisco, and Livestream's retired blog, were read from dated Internet Archive captures of the publisher's own pages. Netflix's, Amazon's and Tubi's audience figures were read from their own press releases, which name the measurement company where there is one. Twitch's help center renders only with JavaScript even in the Internet Archive, so its VOD period and storage limit were read in a browser rather than re-fetched by script, and Instagram's live archive period comes from a news report quoting its 2020 announcement because its help pages would not load. We left out a Japanese government survey report whose server delivers it too slowly to check automatically; audience estimates from third-party trackers such as TwitchTracker and Streams Charts, which do not publish a method we could check; and every market-size estimate from a market-research reseller.

We only cite the producer: government agencies, regulators, company filings and official posts, and the survey owner's own report. We do not cite statistics roundups, Statista-style aggregators, or salary sites without a public method. We did not bypass paywalls or sign-up forms; where a full report was gated, we used only the figures its publisher states publicly.

Figures marked "our calculation" are arithmetic on the cited numbers, and anyone can reproduce them:

This edition contains no Mark Studios customer data.

Limitations

• Most scale figures come from the platforms themselves. Twitch, YouTube, Netflix, Meta and TikTok state their own totals in blog posts, press releases, advertising pages and earnings calls. No one audits them, and many are floors ("over", "more than"). Where a figure was measured by Nielsen or TVision, the page says so.
• Live audiences are counted in incompatible ways. Peak concurrent streams, average minute audience and unduplicated reach are different measures, and one stream can have several viewers. The tables label each figure's measure; do not rank them against each other.
• Several figures are old because nobody has updated them. Meta's livestream figure is from April 2020, YouTube's Super Chat figures from July 2019, Twitch's figures on unwatched past broadcasts from 2014, and Meta's Facebook Live specifications from a 2020 capture. Each is dated where it appears.
• Archive rules and technical limits are a snapshot. They were read from help, developer and announcement pages in September 2026, several through Internet Archive captures because the live pages block automated requests. Twitch's help center renders only with JavaScript, so its two rules on this page were read in a browser on September 28, 2026.
• Government counts measure different things. CNNIC counts internet users in mainland China who have used live streaming at all, including shopping streams; Japan's ministry asks about named live-streaming services; Korea's figure comes from a media diary panel; Statistics Canada's sports figure mixes live and on-demand viewing.
• Few U.S. or UK surveys ask about watching live streams. Pew's Twitch figures cover teens aged 13 to 17 only, and its religious services figure includes television. We found no verifiable Ofcom figure for UK adults.
• The popular statistics traced here were mostly published by companies selling live video. Livestream, Facebook, LinkedIn, Cisco and Ooyala each had a product to sell; none published a method for the figures that are still repeated.

How to cite this page

For a single figure, cite the original publisher named next to it, and link here if the verification trail is useful to your readers. Each figure has its own anchor, so you can link straight to it, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/livestream-video-statistics#ARC-013. To cite the page as a whole:

Mark Studios. "Livestream Video Statistics." Last verified Sep 23, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/livestream-video-statistics

@misc{markstudios_livestream_video_statistics_2026,
  author = {{Mark Studios}},
  title = {{Livestream Video Statistics}},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/livestream-video-statistics},
  note = {Last verified 2026-09-23}
}

Our calculations and the evidence table are free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Each underlying figure remains the claim of its original publisher, and some publishers ask for a link when their figures are reused.

Sources

Download the evidence table (CSV)

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41. Twitch, On-Demand Content on Twitch (undated). Accessed 2026-09-28.
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43. Twitch, Clips - Twitch Developers (undated). Accessed 2026-09-23.
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48. 9to5Mac (quoting Instagram), Instagram increases Live video limit to 4 hours, debuts Live Archive save feature (2020-10-27). Accessed 2026-09-28.
49. Twitch, Important: Changes To Audio In VODs (2014-08-06). Accessed 2026-09-23.
50. Twitch, A Letter from Twitch President Dan Clancy on Subscription Revenue Shares (2022-09-21). Accessed 2026-09-23.
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52. Twitch, An Update to Several Streamer Payout Programs (2024-01-24). Accessed 2026-09-23.
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Update policy and change log

We re-verify every figure quarterly and when a major source publishes a new edition. The next scheduled review is December 2026. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.

• Sep 23, 2026: First published with 127 figures from 22 publishers, each checked against its original source.
• Sep 28, 2026: Confirmed three platform rules we had left unconfirmed: Twitch's 7-day period for past broadcasts on most accounts and its 100-hour storage limit for Highlights and Uploads (read in a browser, since Twitch's help center renders only with JavaScript), and Instagram's 30-day Live Archive, announced in October 2020.
• Oct 3, 2026: YouTube revised its live encoder settings table. It now recommends 17 Mbps for a 1080p60 stream in H.264, up from 12 Mbps when we published, and 12 Mbps in AV1 or H.265. We updated the figure, the platform comparison table and the FAQ.
• Oct 15, 2026: Added Ooyala’s per-device live and on-demand minutes per play (Q4 2013) to the "8x longer" trace, with a chart: the 8x holds for connected TVs only. Its usual citation, Tubular Insights, has closed.
• Oct 15, 2026: Listed every figure Livestream published from its 2016 survey with New York Magazine, with where each appeared. livestream.com now redirects to Vimeo, so pages citing the survey link to nothing.
• Oct 19, 2026: Added where the "$70 billion by 2021" and "$124.6 billion by 2025" streaming figures come from: forecasts for all video streaming, restated by Mediakix (whose site is now offline) as live streaming statistics. Both versions are linked through the Internet Archive.
• Oct 30, 2026: Corrected the dates on Twitch’s payout rules: Partner Plus launched on October 1, 2023 (announced June 15), the lower 300 Plus Points threshold applied from May 1, 2024, and the 55% ad share applied from June 2022 to creators in the Ads Incentive Program and from August 2022 to Affiliates who run at least three minutes of ads an hour. Korea’s live and replay shares are now described as shares of the Korea Media Panel, not of viewers.
• Oct 31, 2026: Added Ofcom's window to the live-stream figure for children: the 12% are of children aged 11 to 17 who had come across harmful content in the past four weeks.