Depends on your definition of mainstream. I know some huge games like League of Legends, DOTA2, and Starcraft routinely do 6 figure concurrent viewer counts for tourneys. That is higher than a lot of TV. I personally have had 8,000 live viewers.
NFL like status is not attainable so lets not say that this is the business plan. Yes the users can move somewhere else, but for gaming twitch is the de facto site for streaming right now. There has been talk of switching sites whenever some streamers get aggravated but it would have to be a huge failure to have people switch en masse.
It is also not easy to do live streaming. It uses massive amounts of bandwidth, and you have to keep this going live to people all over the world. Twitch is the YouTube of video game streaming at the moment and it would be hard to unseat them.
I stream primarily fighting games (Street Fighter) which is a much smaller audience than the games I mentioned, but EVO world championships does over 130k live viewers every July. EVO is the largest tournament in Fighting games. Our demographic is very young, and we have a lot of serious fans that have actually come to our location from far away to play with us.
Keep in mind these are concurrent video viewers over the course of many hours. If you take video plays like Youtube does it measures in the many millions for a tournament like EVO.
NFL like status is not attainable so lets not say that this is the business plan. Yes the users can move somewhere else, but for gaming twitch is the de facto site for streaming right now. There has been talk of switching sites whenever some streamers get aggravated but it would have to be a huge failure to have people switch en masse.
It is also not easy to do live streaming. It uses massive amounts of bandwidth, and you have to keep this going live to people all over the world. Twitch is the YouTube of video game streaming at the moment and it would be hard to unseat them.