TwitchCon 2024 report: a thousand Truman Shows, all streaming at once

“You’re making the Truman Show. Just no one else is part of it.” These words from Welsh streamer Connor Colquhoun, better known as CDawgVA, left me with a string of thoughts about IRL (In Real Life) streaming at TwitchCon, the bi-annual gathering hosted by streaming platform Twitch.

At TwitchCon you find yourself amid thousands of Trumans, each broadcasting their lives, with some of their feeds intersecting in corridors, on streets, and in bars. Navigating a web of concurrent live videos, you’re constantly aware of walking into someone’s stream at any given time. 

These are some of the most active and enthusiastic of Twitch’s 30 million daily users, leaving their bedrooms and travelling across the world to play games, attend talks, or cosplay. They not only have a chance to meet their favourite streamers but also their longtime online friends in person for the first time. I sat next to a young streamer on the Eurostar to Rotterdam, nervous about their first solo trip abroad, and later spotted them comfortably settled with their new IRL friends at the convention. The pilgrimage seems worth it. 

The platform’s journey began as an experiment in 2007 when entrepreneur Justin Kan began broadcasting his life 24/7 on then-single-channel streaming site Justin.tv. By 2011, Twitch was created as a separate spin-off entity dedicated to gaming, based on a popular niche carved out by its users. This new platform not only changed how we watch and play video games, but also evolved the possibilities within streaming communities and their interactions. TwitchCon is one such example. The inaugural event was held in San Francisco in 2015, and it now takes place twice a year, once in North America (usually in San Diego) and once in Europe (moving between countries, but in Rotterdam for 2024 and 2025). 

As I walked to the Rotterdam Ahoy convention centre to pick up my pass for this year’s event, I watched various TwitchCon-related streams on my phone – from a 160km bike ride to Rotterdam to someone casually eating a sandwich before the convention, watched by over 2,000 viewers at the time. The Twitch app became a portal for vicarious alternative TwitchCon experiences, some of which I’d later find myself in. At the opening ceremony, CEO Dan Clancy would also reveal a new version of the app, exclusive to TwitchCon guests for preview, stating that 70% of new viewers start watching Twitch on their mobile – and this number is growing. 

The increasing popularity of IRL streaming brings Twitch back to its roots as a site that popularised the term ‘lifecasting’. The technology required for IRL streams ranges from a simple mobile phone on a selfie stick to sophisticated backpack set-ups costing thousands of pounds for extended streams involving travel or outdoor activities. Attending panels on IRL streaming and women’s safety highlighted the barriers to entry – often favouring men with financial resources – and the dangers of sharing locations with a global audience. 

CDawgVA, both a gaming and IRL streamer with millions of followers, is no stranger to the parasocial relationships that develop between streamers and viewers. At the end of his panel session on non-gaming content, when asked if there were any more questions, a woman behind me muttered under her breath, “What’s your phone number?”

TwitchCon offered a variety of unique experiences, from making chocolate roses with French patisserie streamer Chocolatier_PaulGarderes to watching anonymous Vtubers (Bao, Nihmune, and Shylily) host a live podcast behind a screen. I saw Sweet_Anita, a streamer with Tourette’s syndrome, leading a game show, and attended a highlight session on the importance of stream teams with Black Twitch UK – the UK’s first partnered stream team for Black creators, founded by GeekyCassie and Ebonix.  

All this demonstrated how far streaming has come. The world’s first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot in the Trojan Room of Cambridge University in 1993, and was used to monitor coffee levels without people having to leave their desks. The pot became one of the internet’s first stars, rivalling some of today’s popular streamers in its global reach. From the few surviving images of this early internet broadcast to today’s subcategories of livestreamed videos on Twitch, YouTube and other streaming platforms, these online moving images form a significant part of a landscape that remains critically underrepresented in the BFI National Archive collections. To address this gap, the BFI is embarking on a two-year Lottery funded project called Our Screen Heritage, with a contemporary collecting strand focused on updating its archiving practices to better represent the creativity of the internet. 

After all, Twitch is named after a gaming term that tests the player’s response time via the rapid movements of their fingers on a controller. Likewise the BFI is upping its own responses to what is happening in the Truman Shows of today and preserving some of them for future generations to come. This way, we’ll ensure that the BFI National Archive’s always expanding collection continues to capture the contemporary moment, to reflect the 21st century, just as it does the 20th.