Trying to figure out how to watch coverage of the election results as they rolled in last night was, as it usually is, a chore. Hasan Piker's 16 hour marathon Twitch stream was the only one that approached politics from a perspective that makes any sense to me, and judging by the peak of 230,000 viewers he had last night, I'm not alone.
Piker, a traditional broadcast journalist turned video game streamer turned broadcast journalist again, has had quite a year. In 2019, Piker was still too controversial to make waves, despite his burgeoning popularity. After streaming Among Us with U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the time of Piker getting suspended from Twitch for his political comments seems like a distant fantasy. Although AOC's stream peaked as the third most viewed stream on Twitch of all time, Piker brings in numbers that are nothing to sneeze at on his own. Last night Piker hopped on Twitch for a casual, sixteen hour election stream with rotating guests.
