YouTube is Finally Taking on Twitch for Video Game Streaming
After failing to purchase Twitch last year, YouTube has kind of sat on their hands for making video game streaming easier and more palatable for YouTubers. Twitch has cornered the video game streaming market and YouTube wants to take that corner away.
If you currently stream to Twitch, chances are you are more than capable to stream to YouTube without any additional software. In fact, from personal experience I find the YouTube streaming experience to be significantly better. The video quality is nearly double that of Twitch (3500 Kbps vs 6000 Kbps+) and with a standard account on both, I can stream in 1080P at 60fps on YouTube whereas on Twitch, I am limited to 1080P 30fps at a paltry 3.5 Mbps before the video gets choppy for everyone. Bear in mind, I have a 75/75Mbps connection that almost always scores higher than that. The bottom line is, YouTube has a more than capable system to handle the bandwidth and encoding.
The downside with YouTube’s current system is that comments during the video are difficult to track and moderate and do not save to the video after the stream. Also, if you are not in a video game oriented partnership program, you will most certainly face copyright claims from basically everywhere. These two points have been needing addressing for years, but this has been largely falling on deaf ears with YouTube. Perhaps this will be the turning point that will fix Copyright claims. If they’re planning on taking on the video game streaming service, they better get that straightened out soon.
In a comedic reply to The Daily Dot’s request for comment, a YouTube representative posted this as their response:
YouTube will likely address their video game streaming service soon. When they do, we’ll definitely have an article up on that.
