With the rapid growth in popularity of eSports, gameplay video is growing even bigger. Twitch.tv is great for long-form broadcasting, but what if you just want to watch or share a quick highlight clip? Plays.tv was built for that exact purpose, and users seem to be flocking to the service in droves.
Available as both a Chrome extension and a standalone app, Plays.tv makes it easy for streamers to capture short clips and easily share them to the service. On the site, gamers share their favorite clips, making it more of a social network for gamers than a one-to-many video platform.
Due to its focus on short clips, Plays.tv isn’t anything close to a Twitch competitor, and that’s a good thing. The services actually complement each other, allowing professional gamers who spend hours streaming to quickly share highlights instead of needing to manually edit videos before uploading them to a site like YouTube.
The site must be doing something right, because although it hasn’t even been around for a year, yesterday the company announced it has already passed 10 million active monthly users. Plays.tv is available in 180 countries worldwide and features four million content creators recording more than 1.6 billion minutes of video monthly across over 2,000 games.
“Plays.tv is really a video storytelling platform that enables gamers to share their stories the way they want,” CEO of Plays.tv parent company Raptr and former professional gamer Dennis Fong said. “We’re blown away by the user growth and engagement we’re seeing. Now we’re ready to open up the platform to developers who have been asking to tap into our service and community.”
The Plays.tv Platform launched publicly yesterday, allowing game developers to integrate the service directly into their games. Video sharing on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles has gotten gamers used to quickly sharing clips, and Plays.tv hopes to fill that niche for PC gamers. The Game Events API allows games to provide real-time metadata to the Plays.tv client, enabling automatic creation of highlights for events like Pentakills in League of Legends, which uses the API.
Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive already integrates the Plays.tv Game Events API, and soon Dota 2 will as well. With the platform now open to all, it likely won’t be long before many more games — especially those popular among streamers and Web video creators — are integrating the service as well.
