Recently streamer mokrivskiy announced event CIS Twitch Oscar 2020 (all in Russian and with Russian-speaking streamers), which includes multiple nominations, including a nomination called “Breakthrough of the year”. As far as I understood, Twitch viewers and streamers proposed nominees for the contest. Before the event I was thinking about how to classify Twitch channels into various categories, for example, rising stars, declining, stable. Category “Rising stars” and nomination “Breakthrough of the year” sound similar to me, so I looked at twelve nominees to see how growing Twitch channels look like. In this post I will try to jump in into an opportunity to analyse these channels and try to prioritize speed of analysis delivery over building data pipelines and managing infrastructure. The goal is to look at nominated channels through multiple angles such as hours streamed and viewed, followers, and viewers.

For the last two years I have been fetching data from Twitch API using StreamSets Data Collector and over the course of these two years Twitch API pipelines were scheduled in various ways: JDBC Query Consumer, Cron script, Orchestration pipelines.

In the previous post we have explored Twitch API using Elixir programming language. We have done our exploration in order to plan how to build a process that acquires data from Twitch API. Data acquisition problem is a common problem in Data analysis and Business intelligence. In data warehousing there is a process called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), which represents how data flows from source systems to destinations. One way to acquire data is to write custom code for each source (bringing challenges of maintenance, flexibility, reliability). The other way is to use one of systems that were built to solve the data acquisition problem.

The goal of the project Rill is to collect data about online streams from Twitch (and, possibly, other streaming platforms) for further analysis. Set up Twitch client ID according to: http://blog.danielberkompas.com/elixir/2015/03/21/manage-env-vars-in-elixir.html The process to obtain data about streams for a particular user looks like this: Find user’s username (e.g., from a Twitch URL) Make a request to Twitch API to convert username to stream id. Make a request to Twitch API to obtain data about user’s stream (is there a live steam, is there a recording being played) In stage 1 we will write a simple functions to explore Twitch API.