Cross-cultural comparison of interactive streaming services: Evidence from Twitch

•Cultural communication behavior in interactive live streaming platforms is presented.•Viewers’ consumption behavior and expression types are addressed in the platforms.•There are notable linguistic and psychological differences between the cultures. A cross-cultural study of interactive live streaming platforms was conducted to investigate emotional differences in communication behavior. We collected 10,432,423 chat messages from Twitch streams, and our analysis was twofold: (1) classifying viewers by their consumption behavior and (2) analyzing subscribers’ emote usage and emotional expressions. The results showed that there are significant differences in several linguistic and psychological dimensions of emotional expressions between Western and Eastern cultures. Along with these cultural differences, our study addresses the importance of encouraging the social interaction in Twitch for viewer engagement.