It wasn't long ago that
Google launched YouTube Gaming, a clear effort to try to win gamers over from
Twitch.tv. Last weekend Twitch held its first TwitchCon event and they fired
right back at YouTube during it. Let's catch up on some of the news.
Twitch.tv (which is now
owned by Amazon) is all about broadcasting gameplay. You can watch anything
from huge e-sports competitions down to your friend trying out a game for the
first time, but everything is captured live. That'll change in 2016 when Twitch
starts allowing you to upload videos to the service.
Obviously YouTube
already supports this, but why is is important? Think of it in terms of TV;
some content is performed live and some is carefully edited before being show
to an audience. For instance if you're making machinima you probably want to do
lots of takes and then pick the best clips to string together into a show.
You'd probably want to capture all your footage offline and then when you've
carefully edited your video, only then release it to your audience.
In the nearer term,
Twitch is going to let you set up playlists of clips that you've captured live,
and you can set them up to play back when you're offline. That means your
Twitch channel never has to be dead air. When you're not live you can air
're-runs' of your best material.
On a more technical
note, Twitch is moving towards ditching Flash in favor of HTML5, although it's
going to take a while, with a Q2 2016 target. Good news, I just wish it could
happen sooner.
Playstation owners
should be happy to learn that they're finally getting a proper Twitch app.
Currently you can broadcast to Twitch from a Playstation 4, and you can watch
other PS4 Twitch streams via Sony's "Live From Playstation" app but
if you want to watch Twitch content from any other platform you're out of luck unless
you want to wrestle with the PS4's web browser.
That'll change later
this fall when the PS4, Playstation Vita and Playstation 3 all get a new Twitch
app that "gives you the full Twitch experience" although they really
mean the full Twitch viewing experience. Baked-in broadcasting to Twitch will
still be limited to the PS4, but the PS3 and Vita will let you watch and
interact with streams from anywhere.
The TechnoFile by Peter Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment