You might experience conflicting emotions—and at the same time—when watching reality shows like Bigg Boss and Lock Upp. Irritation, amusement, shock, and of course, the hilarity of it all. That said, experiencing a potboiler alone on your couch can be no fun. Prashant Singh realised this quite early on. But the Jharkhand-based software engineer didn’t have the bandwidth. Singh, known as BeastStats online, was already quite a hit for his geeky curation—three years ago, he published a bar graph on YouTube, which depicted the total screentime of all the superheroes in Avengers’ Infinity War and Endgame. When the pandemic hit, there was suddenly ample time to experiment. “I began by playing online chess with [comedian] Samay Raina.” The repartee and banter between the two, made watching chess unusually funny. “It was Samay who then suggested that I start streaming my own content.”

That’s how Singh landed up on Twitch, an interactive service dedicated for livestreaming content that spans gaming, music, entertainment, and sports. Today, a quick search on the Internet about the best Indian Twitch streamers has BeastStats right up there. With 16.9K followers, Singh provides content that’s known to be a laugh riot. That all of it is livestreamed means his one-liners are spontaneous, unscripted, and of course, unedited. Though gaming streamers have existed for a while—Ajey Nagar alias CarryMinati being among the more popular—livestreaming has evolved, with the routine and banal drawing in an audience.