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Comment by cinbun8 | Hacker News Reader

Youtube's goal would be to get people over to their gaming product instead of heading over to twitch. Plans for monetization come later. That should not be a concern considering twitch does not stream properly for many users. My friends on Steam share the same opinion (At least the ones in Asia).

Streaming any game in real time and getting enough folks to watch it is still a problem that needs a solution with more polish. Twitch does not keep up and `Steam streaming` does not work half the time. I'd stream games on gaming.youtube.com if they did a better job at it and have a product focused around that.

I can foresee a future where youtube can get those eyeballs on `gaming.youtube.com` instead of twitch.tv. Youtube is already popular for gaming reviews.

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Streaming a game in real time with low bandwidth requirement is a problem we've had a solution to since the dawn of multiplayer games but that seems to have been forgotten in modern games: Spectator mode.

You use your game client to connect to the same server that the actual game is playing on, only receive the small packets of player information and then render it locally.

This will of course eventually also overload the server with enough spectators but some kind of forwarding proxy should be able to solve this easily.

Voice commentary and a professional host choosing the best camera angle is still missing but this is also something that could be embedded into the game if the game developers really wanted to.

Would be interesting if there was a game-independent spectator protocol. Hmm.

Not really since you'd still need the game assets.

not really an option since it would require that the viewers have the game installed. It's a complete other format for shows that focus on a single game. It seems overkill to burden the viewers with dedicated clients (and a step backwards?) for a problem on the side of the streamer.

A dedicated client is a lot of effort, but also gives way more options for viewers. IMHO it is a thing for a different audience: It's great for games the viewer is highly invested in and also plays, but a giant hassle for casual viewing. Outside of a few special examples it probably doesn't pay off.

A player broadcasting his view has value of its own. In League of Legends, we don't see the player's perspective in spectator mode. We don't see what they type in team chat. We don't hear what they're saying.

A dedicated client has its benefits as well for the same reasons. You can change the view and look at things from different perspectives or look at places that the streamer (who is not necessarily the player I guess) is not looking at.

You can expect most interested watchers to already have the game installed since they play it themselves.

But yeah, it's no silver bullet for sure. A common problem with older games that had this feature was that stored replays of matches wasn't compatible with newer versions of the game.

That already happens in a number of games. Notably Dota2 has had millions of viewers watching via game client for their large tournaments.

A huge problem is bandwidth, especially if you need to play a game like an online first person shooter which needs every bit of bandwidth it can get.

It's unlikely an FPS needs high bandwidth -- typically less than the lowest-quality, 2005-age YouTube-video. Even with a high-tick game, you're looking at topping out at around 35KB. Yes there are going to be gamers in countries with less-developed internet, but I'd wager many streamers are pulling a minimum of 1MB+ and more likely 5-10MB+ egress.

I think I have a decent connection and I only have 60 mb down and 30 mb up. it is good enough to stream 1080p 60fps to YouTube.

YouTube promises two (well one actually) change that I welcome. It will allow one URL which I presume will go to the live broadcast and it promises that you won't have to create an event every time you start broadcasting.

With these two changes, I am ready to switch to YouTube at any time.

It's not only bandwidth, it's also the computing power it take to capture and compress a frame. Capturing @ 60 FPS with say Shadow Play isn't an issue, but when you are starting to compress it to a format you can upload it gets a bit dodgy. And 30mbit upload isn't enough to stream uncompressed video in 1080p.

Top streamers are going to have two PCs / dedicated capture-hardware and beefier i7 equivalents. Most [PC] games are GPU bound and don't require much more than an i5.

The bandwidth isn't the problem...latency is the problem. Most consumer broadband providers don't give much of a crap about low-latency connections, because when you're watching a static, 5-minute YouTube video, it isn't horrible if it comes with a 500ms delay before play start. It matters a hell of a lot more when the video is live.

Once you're streaming something live and interactively, if nothing else, you're getting boned by the limits of physics: for example, a connection from a datacenter in California has a (current) ~150ms minimum round-trip latency to Europe. That's bordering on a human-perceptible lag, and that's the best case. As I said before, most providers don't give you anywhere near the best case. So you spend a ton of money setting up datacenter and peering arrangements and low-latency interconnects, but you're still in a tough place if your broadcaster is connected to a craptastic residential ISP in New York, and your viewer is in Hong Kong.

Maybe YouTube can do better simply because they're YouTube. But I doubt it. Everything YouTube has done has been to optimize the case of static video delivery, which is a different (and much easier) game. Doing live video at scale requires a different architecture.

I was only arguing on bandwidth, so I think we agree there.

As for latency, Twitch -- the current de-facto -- already has multiple seconds of latency added on top of the encoder and decoder delays. Being aggressively realtime and uber interactive with your stream is not really a reality yet. You can right-click a Twitch stream to see these kind of stats; for example, a Game's Done Quick Stream: http://i.imgur.com/dcPoRui.png

Why would one care about latency? If you're just watching, does a couple of seconds of latency really make any difference?

Even during soccer games, where there's often 20+ seconds between the radio & cable transmissions, I've never seen it being a problem. People just choose turn off the radio.

Online games don't normally need much bandwidth since they're just communicating the player's positions, velocity gunfire etc. None of that data is particularly big. Latencies on the other hand are really important.

This was about streaming video of such games. Not every viewer watches from within those games. And for the video with lots of fast movements and reactions you'll certainly need bandwidth.

I don't understand what is the difference between streaming a programming class and gaming (first person shooting for example) ? (say we can have a minimum frame rate for both , like 30), is there anything other than a pure video ? as you said no one watch video from inside game (at least we are not talking about it)

p.s. sorry , I got my answer from someone else's comment , latency is problem , no one care if video starts 500ms late , but this is huge problem in gaming streaming.

That's not the only reason. I am not expert by any stretch, but I believe video codecs work by essentially storing diffs of different frames rather then the entire frame. I imagine in a programming class, a large portion of the screen will not need to be redrawn very frequently (background of slides, things on the wall of a classroom, etc.). However a fast moving FPS will constantly need to redraw almost everything in the environment. So that would necessarily require a lot more throughput per frame.

A huger problem is copyright nonsense. If Google allows e.g. automated takedowns of gamer video because there's music playing somewhere in the background no amount of video streaming virtuosity will work.

And the background music is a pretty huge deal for all streamers I watch on Twitch (I'm a daily visitor.) Almost every game streamer displays a marquee-like box showing the details of the current track.

There are also music streams on Twitch, wonder what Google will do with them.

Google is capable of removing sound and retaining video

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