Move over, cat videos — there’s a new online craze: watching strangers play video games live.
Twitch.tv — a Web site that shows people narrating video games while they play them — is the No. 1 bandwidth hog when it comes to the popular practice of live video streaming, according to new data released on Wednesday.
That’s right! Watching strangers around the globe get to the next level in Minecraft or Call of Duty: Ghosts is driving more Web traffic than live videos from Major League Baseball, WWE’s popular wrestling matches, or even the news, according to Qwilt, a company that measures broadband traffic.
According to Qwilt, live gaming site Twitch.tv currently makes up 43.6 percent of all live streaming traffic, compared to 17.7 percent for the No. 2 live streamer, entertainment giant WWE.
Popular sporting sites MLB.com and ESPN came in No. 4 and 5 on Qwilt’s ranking, released Wednesday, while live streaming from news sites CNN.com and NBCnews.com came in at No.s 9 and 10.
Twitch.tv’s new-found dominance in the live streaming world arose “from nowhere,” said Mark Fisher, vice president at Qwilt, which sells software to help Internet service providers manage their video traffic. Twitch “wasn’t even on [Qwilt’s] radar” last year, Fisher said.
A huge driver of Twitch.tv’s growth can be tied to new streaming functions built into Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s XBox One. This has let anyone with a console stream live video of themselves playing the latest game.
By its own metrics, Twitch.tv now boasts more than 1 million unique broadcasters a month, up from 600,000 last year and 300,000 in 2012. Twitch.tv, which was founded in 2011, has also more than doubled its viewership to 45 million from 20 million in 2012.
Of course, Twitch.tv still has a long way to go to become the next Netflix. When looking at the entire universe of video streaming — not just live — Twitch.tv ranked No. 5 in the US, but with a volume of 1.5 percent. By contrast, Netflix, the No. 1 consumer of broadband, makes up a whopping 57 percent of all streaming traffic.
Also, Twitch.tv isn’t dominating the world of Web videos by all metrics. According to Web data tracker Comscore, Twitch Interactive, which owns Twitch.tv, ranked 69th overall for all US video properties based on unique video viewers. Comscore ranked Twitch 29th overall in terms of videos viewed.
Qwilt said it believes volume is a better overall measure of popularity than clicks or views.
Twitch.tv’s expansion plans include making its streaming service more accessible on smartphones and other mobile devices so fans can watch video games being played on the go, said Stewart Alsop, an investor and director in Twitch.tv.
“The game is shifting to mobile and that’s the thing that company is working hard on,” Alsop told The Post.