News service BuzzFeed has suggested that it will turn its live video focus away from Facebook Live and towards Twitch.

Twitch rose to prominence as a video games streaming platform but is rapidly ramping up its non-games content.

“We’re seeing that start to switch over as more publishers put things other than gaming onto the site,” head of live video at BuzzFeed News Andrew Kimmel told Digiday. “It feels like the time is right. Publishers are able to push out streams not directly related to video games to a whole new audience. That’s new territory to explore.

“The online audience is very different to the TV audience. These platforms give us the opportunity to speak directly to these viewers.”

IRL

BuzzFeed’s output on Facebook Live this year have so far attracted less than 50,000 views. Its most successful Twitch livestream, in contrast, won 168,000 views alone. Indeed, The Washington Post’s Facebook Live stream of Mark Zukerberg’s grilling at congress in April attracted just 7,000 views.

The biggest issue with Twitch is discoverability, however, and non-games brands have not yet figured out how to consistently tap into the appropriate Twitch audiences. There is also the issue that while such brands have already garnered audiences on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, they are all starting from scratch on Twitch.

“One of the fastest-growing nongaming categories on Twitch is IRL [In Real Life], where users can capture things going on in the world around them,” a Twitch spokesperson said. “Because of our highly engaged and interactive community in chat, events become a shared real-time experience on a global scale.”

Get the latest news, interviews and in-depth analysis on Twitter and Facebook.