Jaime Staples and the Twitch/YouTube Alternative

Jaime Staples’ Idea: Let’s Make Our Own Platform!

On March 15th, 2026, Jaime Staples asked poker creators if they would like to participate in the creation of their own video site.

Here’s what Staples proposes:

• Share the cost equally, membership fee monthly for hosting
• Sell no ads but sponsorships are free reign through your own videos and description
• Ownership for first 50 or X creators
• No cost to anyone to watch

This isn’t about making the platform a “Twitch/YouTube killer”.  It is about giving the community an alternative place for posting without being hunted down by major websites that label this content as either gambling or casino games.

Frankie C wondered how it would work if he posted the same video on YouTube and this platform simultaneously, so Staples explained his idea a little more:

Players’ Reaction to Jaime’s Proposition

Some commentators found the idea of having our own video website free from third-party influence quite appealing.

For example, after a few clarifications, Jake “nekbeardhersh” Hershey supported Jaime by stating:

However, some players weren’t thrilled at all, including Matt Berky who commented:

“Aside from hosting costs which alone make this wildly expensive for creators, the real hurdle is a lack of reach. People migrated from twitch to YouTube for a reason. 

If the only concern were not being throttled by restrictions everyone would move to kick or patreon or just develop their own site. YouTube’s more than just a hosting site, they are a search engine, a distributor, and an advertiser all wrapped in one. No need to reinvent the wheel if you just want to move off of YouTube.”

Didn’t Someone Already Try to Beat YouTube and Twitch?

Of course the world already tried to launch alternatives for Twitch and YouTube without limiting them to one type of content — and it hasn’t worked well so far.

Kick, the most popular Twitch competitor, has firmly established itself as a gambling platform with extremely questionable content. No self-respecting English-speaking poker streamers are in a hurry to go there. You won’t find Lex Veldhuis and Spraggy there, for example — and even Kevin Martin, in an attempt to promote his channel, managed to bring to his Kick channel only 139 followers, even though he has over 144k of them on Twitch.

Trovo and W TV, other supposed Twitch killers, are also as good as dead, currently flooded by non-English content creators primarily focused on video gaming. Vimeo on the other hand is popular for sharing videos in private format but it’s not poker friendly and has close to zero tools for attracting viewers and monetizing your work directly on the platform.

RuTube is politicized, overregulated and focused on Russian-speaking content with so little poker representation that it can be dismissed as basically non-existent.

All other [WORD]Tubes on the Internet attract even less attention, either quickly shutting down or re-classifying as news sites that provide links to YouTube.

By the way, the poker community has already tried to create some specialized platforms before as well.

We have a PokerGO streaming service that has a lot of exclusive poker video content from all kinds of series available via subscription but it’s still using massive advertisements on its YouTube channel to reach viewers. We also have WatchWPT broadcasting the World Poker Tour and publishing videos from its series — which I know of only because I accidentally found it while writing this article.

Finally, we have PokerTube that, in 2026, works only as a frame to access poker content from YouTube (where its own channel stopped updating in June 2025). So, the situation with alternatives is jarring, to say the least.

Why Jaime’s Idea Might Not Work

Creating a unique platform with the sole purpose of giving poker players a space for sharing their video is harder that it sounds. For starters, it would need:

• Study the legal side of creating such a platform
• Formalize ownership rights
• Make a team of content creators who are ready to spend their time and resources to create a website that works properly
• Come up with and pay for the creation of a design for all its elements
• Agree with the team on advertising rules on and off the platform
• Resolve the hosting issue
• Choose a secure and clear system for accepting membership fees
• Approve with the team a form for regular reporting on the spending of these fees
• Develop a site support plan

If poker brands or players who aren’t content creators decide to sponsor this platform, that brings a lot of additional legal and financial challenges that need to be addressed too.

And even if you manage to resolve everything from the above list, the main problem is much less solvable: How to attract new people to a new platform that’s specializes in such a niche thing as poker?

You can try to lure your current audience from other platforms to a new one, but people are creatures of habit. The majority chooses to stay where they are comfortable, especially when it comes to YouTube, which offers a variety of content all in one place.

The new website will inevitably have trouble attracting brand new viewers because they won’t have a way to learn about it without a targeted search, which a tiny number of people actually do. Even with all the restrictions, YouTube and Twitch still have an advantage thanks to random offers that pop up in front of non-poker folks without any effort on their part.

So until Staples, or someone in the industry, can figure out how to solve this wider reach problem, this idea remains a fantasy.