From “Better than real sports”
to “Just Chatting”

The September 15, 2011 replay appears unstyled: blue links on white, not the original design. The words survived. At the top: a search field, Browse Games, Log In, Sign Up.

Then the headline, Better than real sports, and a few live channels. Lower down, Discover awesome games and players. opens a longer list, each channel with a number beside it and an empty box where its picture should be.

The image descriptions in the code name the games: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Minecraft and Dead Island. One StarCraft channel is described as Steven Bonnell II plays SC2: Tune in to see Destiny dominate with Zerg. A Minecraft stream promises Minecraft 1.8 - Establishing new town! And a Dead Island co-op lists SuushiSam as one of its players. Remember that name.

Twitch.tv launched on June 6, 2011, out of Justin.tv,^[1] and the footer in this capture's HTML, below the part in our screenshot, still says © Justin.tv Inc. 2011. Broadcasters who moved over kept the views, followers and videos of their old Justin.tv channels.^[2] One more trace sits in the source. An HTML comment meant to name the server that built the page reads host: <%= $app_hostname %>, a template tag nobody filled in.

By June 1, 2012 the design survives, and it looks like furniture. A dark header carries the metallic TWITCH logo with its little TV plaque. Under it, a big black box sits between four stream tiles. Then comes a blue gradient bar with a grey Browse button and the same line as before, Discover awesome games and players.

The rest of the page is a stack of metal shelves, one per game: a box cover on the left, channels beside it, each with a red viewer icon and a count. On the Diablo III shelf, KungenTV has 5,983.

The player is black in this capture. Its HTML carries the fallback line You need Adobe Flash Player to watch this video.

To the right of the Browse line the replay shows a stray 404 Not Found in a serif font. That text isn't in the downloaded homepage HTML; it appears only in the replay. At the bottom, a GameSpot logo sits next to © Justin.tv Inc. 2012.

Five months after this capture, Twitch announced redesigned channel pages. At first only broadcasters and their editors could see them. From the week of November 19, viewers were to get a choice between the old and the new layout.^[3]

The February 2, 2013 capture is half styled. The header appears unstyled, so the new purple twitch wordmark sits above three underlined links: Log In, Sign Up, Browse. The metal and the TV plaque are gone. The rest of the first screen is one painted banner of game characters, and after a blank band the featured streams follow as plain text.

That text reads like a weekend schedule. GottaCon 2013 in Victoria, BC, says Tune in all Superbowl Weekend for Live Coverage! After it come IEM Brazil, MLG's Call of Duty: Black Ops II GameBattles, GameSpot and the IGN ProLeague. The page's HTML also holds a ranking of viewers per game: League of Legends 52,856, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria 7,414, Call of Duty: Black Ops II 6,227.

The logo's image description says Twitch. Another image's description reads Glitch. In our February 2019 capture that symbol stands alone in the header.

The next day, February 3, Twitch announced Turbo, a subscription that removed pre-rolls, mid-rolls and display ads. Its own announcement listed the one exception.^[4]

Our February 1, 2014 capture has a button next to Browse that the 2013 one didn't: Go Turbo. The first screen is now a player with one featured channel described beside it. Here that's anthonyacc, playing Minecraft, under the title 24 Hour Partner Celebraish - 24 Hours, 24 Giveaways! (the spelling is the page's). A row of channel thumbnails runs under the player, then Featured Games, led by League of Legends with 62,430 viewers.

The HTML holds blurbs for more featured channels than the one on screen, written like a TV guide. One is for SuushiSam, the Dead Island player from 2011, who has been a viewer on TwitchTV/JustinTV for over three years and an active broadcaster for over two years! The code also holds a menu for rating ads, with options like I’ve seen this ad too many times and The ad broke the player, plus a developer's note: Until we refactor, a duplicate of the ad-feedback-menu is at…

The footer in the HTML still reads © 2014 Justin.tv Inc. Nine days later, on February 10, Justin.tv, Inc. became Twitch Interactive, Inc., and Justin.tv carried on as one of its products.^[5] The code's language menu, closed in the screenshot, lists 28 languages.

The February 2, 2015 capture keeps the player and its blurb; the featured channel is SowzTV. The surprise is in Featured Games. Ahead of Dota 2 (94,392 viewers) and League of Legends (71,072) sits Super Smash Bros. Melee, with 116,009.

Scroll down and the page sorts channels by where they come from. After Top Live Channels comes Top Xbox One Channels, where our screenshot ends. The HTML continues with Top PS4 Channels, Channels broadcasted from PlayStation 4, and a pitch to the viewer: Join the fastest growing community of gaming broadcasters in the world.

The footer in the HTML has a new name: © 2015 Twitch Interactive, Inc., next to a Cookie Policy link the 2014 footer didn't have. Between the two captures, in August 2014, Amazon agreed to buy Twitch for about $970 million in cash.^[8] Nothing on this homepage mentions it.

February 1, 2016: the same layout, one featured channel next to the player. This time it's GSL, marked OFFLINE, and its blurb still announces 2015 Global StarCraft II Season 2 started! on a page saved in 2016. Under the player runs a strip of channel logos.

Featured Games shows 10 tiles, led by League of Legends at 105,234 viewers; the HTML lists 12. Fifth is Poker, at 12,952, ahead of Tom Clancy's The Division and XCOM 2. The header still offers Go Turbo.

The bigger change of the season happened off this page. In October 2015 Twitch announced official support for Creative, streams of people making things, and opened it with 403 episodes of Bob Ross played over 8.5 days, plus a KappaRoss emote.^[9] A week and a half later it declared that Monday night is Bob Ross night.^[10] Nothing in this capture's text mentions Creative. Its lists name games.

The April 1, 2017 capture adds a blue bar under the header: Twitch Prime, then Free loot every month, exclusive discount on new-release games, ad-free viewing, and loads more. and a link to Start 30-day Free Trial. Go Turbo is still up in the header, so the page now sells two ways to skip ads.

Twitch Prime came with Amazon Prime from September 2016. It included one free channel subscription every 30 days, and the streamer was paid for it like any other subscription.^[11] Amazon's purchase, invisible on the 2015 page, now has its own stripe.

The player in this copy shows a ghost and an error: Whoops! This embed is misconfigured. Below it, Featured Games starts with PUBG, League of Legends and Overwatch. The sixth tile isn't a game. It says IRL.

Twitch announced IRL in December 2016, along with rules that made room for streams that aren't about games.^[12] A cookie notice covers the Overwatch card: This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

In our February 1, 2018 capture the header is purple with a white wordmark, and next to Browse are two links the 2017 capture didn't have: Get Desktop and Store. Under a dark game portrait, Featured Games is a row of empty grey tiles. The downloaded HTML has almost no text, just scripts that assemble the page in the browser, and one of their variables is named __twilightBuildID. The page's sharing description is the same as in 2017: Twitch is the world's leading video platform and community for gamers.

That September, Twitch introduced Tags and new categories that replaced and expanded IRL and Creative, and it switched off Communities.^[13]

Then our captures stop. The Wayback copies of the homepage we tried from 2019 to 2025, about 30 over three rounds of scouting, show grey placeholders, blank main areas or Something went wrong where the content should be. A few pieces render, like a channel sidebar in 2021, and the header comes through. In February 2019 the purple bar has lost the wordmark and holds just the Glitch, the speech-bubble icon, in white. By July 2020 the header is white, the Glitch is purple, and the links read Browse, Esports, Music.

The live homepage on October 9, 2026 has the Glitch alone in the corner, a Browse link and a search box. A sidebar lists Live Channels with red dots and counts: ohnePixel in Minecraft at 27.4K, ESLCS in Counter-Strike at 35.3K, StRoGo at 35.5K. The middle is a carousel. Its front stream is DrowzyDrewzie playing Marvel Rivals for 2.1K viewers, tagged womensguild and SOUTHAFRICA.

Below it, Live on Twitch shows three big thumbnails. One is ESL Pro League from Katowice, streamed in Polish, with #reklama in its title and a Polski tag. We took this frame from Poland, which may explain that one. A purple bar pinned to the bottom of the window says Join the Twitch community! Discover the best live streams anywhere.

In 2011 the headline promised something Better than real sports, and the page filed its channels under game box covers. In this sidebar, Overpow and tamae_ are listed under Just Chatting. Counter-Strike still has the biggest numbers on the page. Next to the Polish stream, ESLCS broadcasts the same Katowice event with a presenter and a map score. It looks a lot like real sports.

2011 · Better than real sports2011 · Then2026 · Live Channels2026 · Live

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