This gives me (somewhat surprisingly) lots of the same satisfaction that playing games used to give me plus it's a lot less stressful (I was mostly into competitive multiplayer games) and without any practice required to get good at the game. I mean, I'm sure there are core fans who do that, probably students and single young professionals like you say, but my use case for Twitch is 'hey, I have 10-20 minutes free not even enough time for a full DotA game, but I can see which pro players happen to be online now and watch them play for a bit'. Streamers aren't meant to be consumed by watching them every day for hours on end.
I watch Twitch because I grew up playing lots of video games and now watching is less of a time commitment then playing the games.
