Twitch.tv is a website that provides a platform for entertainers to stream their activities live. Recently acquired by Amazon for nearly one billion dollars, Twitch is ranked above Facebook in peak Internet traffic websites in the United States.

Similar to live television, Twitch grants viewers real time access to a variety of channels. However, being web-based, Twitch also offers additional unique live features, such as chat rooms where viewers of an individual channel can chat among themselves and with the channel host.

Viewing and interacting with channel chat rooms is an important feature of the overall Twitch viewing experience. Our Comment Ranking system improves viewers’ chat experience. Rather than scrolling through long lists of continuously scrolling comments, viewers are presented with a short list of the most popular ones for quick and easy viewing.

Our Smart Advertisements feature listens to both what’s being discussed on the channel and what’s being discussed in chat rooms to identify products being discussed. After identifying the most talked about products, it displays links to those products on Amazon’s website.

Given our two new features, Twitch viewers are able to digest and interact with chat seamlessly while relevant advertisements receive a rise in traffic, which is a win-win for both Twitch viewers and advertisers.

Our Twitch.tv Comment Ranking and Smart Advertisements system is written in PHP and C++ and uses a MySQL database and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Web Services.