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More than 22 billion hours of livestreaming happen on Twitch every year, but its chief executive, Dan Clancy, isn’t content.

Clancy, a former NASA scientist and Google engineering lead, is now the CEO of Twitch, the livestreaming platform that was bought by tech giant Amazon in 2014 for nearly $US1 billion ($1.5 billion). It’s replaced TV for many Gen Z users, who watch and chat with their favourite gamers and e-sports players, often for hours on end.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy.

But Clancy wants to shed some of that reputation.

“People think of us as a gaming platform. But I think about people who are retired, and they have a lot of time on their hands. I see Twitch as a perfect place for someone to talk about knitting,” he said in an interview. “There’s so much other stuff happening on Twitch. I met a 55-year-old trans woman who transitioned three years ago and she does a talk show, and most of the community is middle-aged housewives.”

Twitch is wildly popular among professional gamers and their fans, but Clancy wants to broaden out its cohort of streamers, and viewers.

“I want to make sure people can build their community even if they aren’t streaming 20 or 30 hours a week,” he said. “I want people to still build community even if they are streaming two or three hours a week, not every day, then that greatly expands the number of creators who can create, and the viewers as well.”

Twitch is a popular platform for video game livestreams, owned by Amazon.

Twitch’s key point of difference to rivals TikTok and Instagram is that those platforms aren’t based around communities, according to Clancy. No one pulls up a chair and watches Instagram for 15 minutes without swiping, the executive said, and even YouTube users are conditioned to click on “related videos”. Twitch users, on the other hand, will often watch people they follow all day while they’re working or doing other things.

The concept of passively watching gamers play e-sports seems inherently odd to most people, Clancy said, at least at first.

“When I explain it, I say we have all experienced being tired at the end of the day and coming home and just wanting to turn on the TV and relax,” he said. “You don’t always want to turn on like a new episode of Game of Thrones, right? Because that’s an emotional commitment. And you can’t get distracted in the middle.

“Twitch is the place you can go where you have something that’s entertaining, you can get distracted whenever you want and look at your phone, because there’s no narrative plot that you are going to miss. But any time you want to lean in, you can lean in and pay attention.”

Clancy remains close to former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, who was tapped to serve as interim CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI when its board dismissed Sam Altman last month.

The interview with Clancy was conducted before Altman returned to the CEO position, after most of OpenAI’s staff threatened to leave en masse if Altman wasn’t reinstated.

“I offered my condolences,” Clancy said. “He didn’t say much back, he said it surprised him too.”

Clancy holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Texas at Austin.

“I think what they are doing is silly,” he said of the OpenAI board. “I think the outcome is pretty clear, because the board has no negotiating power. Their only option is OpenAI is worthless and becomes this small elitist thing for people that want to do research on AI safety, and not actually be at the cutting edge of AI, because in the end they will have nobody working there.”

The lesson from the OpenAI drama, if there is one, is that doomsayers are approaching the AI issue from a fundamentally flawed position, according to Clancy.

“In every innovation, bad things have happened, and the biggest one is the industrial revolution and the internal combustion engine,” he said. “That in fact has led to climate change and, in fact, may lead to the extinction of our species.

“But the flaw in the argument is this idea that anyone could predict the bad thing that’s going to happen, and then also get an agreement on an intervention on how to stop the bad thing from happening. We can come up with a solution for climate change now but imagine them trying to come up with that in the 1920s.

“I think people who think that are just wrong.”

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