Hi - i’m not sure what the right category to post this in, so apologies if this is incorrectly categorized.
I saw the announcement of Stream First yesterday. Looks awesome!!!
However, for these games to be effective, the delay (10-20secs) really needs to be reduced. The lesser the delay, the more kinds of games can be built. There are other streaming sites like bolt that are doing 250ms delays.
Does Twitch have any plans on reducing this (at-least for this genre of streams), so we can build better games?
As long as games are built to expect a delay and not an instant response, then I don’t see an issue.
While I am not familiar with Bolt, I don’t think 250ms is “possible” with having a streamer upload content and then a user receive it. not with this size of Twitch - I get that kind of delay on a regular medium quality voice call.
Moving on past that, as I may be incorrect about the above, it would also require every user watching have great internet as now there is no longer any buffering of the video for safe nets, it is now straight play as you receive.
Their scale is much smaller than Twitch so I can appreciate the complexity to do this on Twitch’s level, but atleast tech wise (and on a smaller scale) it seems doable.
The reason I bring this up is we’ve been prototyping games for few months and the most engaging game play’s we’ve come up with don’t work with a delay. Happy to provide specific examples if needed.
Ofcourse, this is not a must, but if you can reduce the delay, it will make a lot more game modes possible.
No, this forum is specifically targeted towards our REST API and chat infrastructure. General feedback about our video system should be sent to feedback@twitch.tv
You are correct that it is technologically “doable” to provide lower delay, but it is very, very hard. Twitch users come from all parts of the globe, with an incredible diversity of devices and connection speeds. Ensuring every user can watch each stream is incredibly difficult even with a 10 second delay. At 250ms it’d be near impossible.
Regardless of the difficulties, we’re still attempting to reduce delay. Our video team is constantly testing new methods of delivering broadcasts. However there is no timeline for when these improvements will be implemented, nor how much the delay will be reduced by. You should continue to develop your games under the assumption that users will experience 10 seconds of delay.
10 seconds delay BEFORE even discussing the fun of delivering video to mobile users or people on bad internet, or where a given ISP is not nice to live video streaming.
So “we” need to give “decent” video to ALL users, rather than prioritising people with the best connections.
Consider that it’s hard for people to play games with people in the US when they are in the EU, it’s common for the ping to be large to screw up FPS’s etc. Same problem in live video and any interactive stuff.