The online streaming/video scene has been heating up as of recent. First Youtube rolled out their enhanced video and streaming playback, then Microsoft jumped in with Beam and it’s FTL (Faster Than Light) and high bitrate support. Leaving many to wonder what was Twitch up to during all of this. After all, Twitch is considered to be the king of online game streaming. Many doubted they were content to let others play in its backyard.
Well, we don’t have to wonder anymore as Twitch has announced several major updates today. The first is upgraded 1080p/60fps support, which was one of the biggest requests over on their forums. They’re also upping the bitrate for streaming, which was previously set to 3500 Kbps or 3.5 Mbps for non-partnered streamers but will now be bumped up to 3-6 Mbps for everyone
They’re also providing several quality options or transcodes, starting today. Meaning that viewers will no longer be stuck with 480p (or worse) when the source quality option isn’t available. This is something that other streaming have incorporated into their players for some time now. So I’m happy to see that Twitch has finally added this on their end.
Finally, they’ve set up a new website, http://stream.twitch.tv, to help streamers take advantage of the upgraded tech. Over on the site are setup guides, ingest status monitors, encoding settings and more. I recommend checking it out if you want to push your streams even higher.
These changes will be an addition to their previous ability that allows streamers to upload videos to their accounts and selling games via the streaming service.
Things are definitely heating up once again.
For more information on this, head on over to Twitch’s blog.
