Suggestion: Delayed/Buffering Streaming Mode for No Stuttering

Dear Developers,

i want to bring a litte suggestion to you that could improve the streaming experience of the twitch users.

Here is the main idea: user can enable a delayed stream mode, where the stream first buffers on users local machine. The delay becomes automatically corrected according to the ammount of “lag” the user has. So for those guys who have big lags, the player buffers for example for 30 or 60 seconds (for during the commercial). For those who have lesser stuttering - for 5 or 10 secondes or something. So you could increase the buffering time for bigger lags and decrease it for the lesser.

The problem of this solution would be the “spoiler chat”. But i suppose there sould be possible to make a delayed chat mode also, where you could synchronise the chat to the stream watching progress. E.g. the chat-handler could request the chat logs for the current section the user is watching, someting like getChatLogFor(yy.mm.dd-hh.mm.ss). However he could not reallly chat on his own, since his messages would appear “in the past” - so for this reason writing own messages in the buffering mode should be disabled.

This way the user can decide himself if he wants to see the live-stream in lower quality when having stuttering issues or if he changes to the buffering mode to the 1 min delay and better streaming quality. Since a lot of chats during the big events are mostly like totally spammed, the delayed chat option should not realy hurt the user, who tooke the decision to watch in the buffered mode.

With best regards,
eXti.de

p.s. currently working alternative is to start the already running stream from “past broadcasts”, however the delay becomes 30 minutes, which unfortunatley destroys the “live” feeling. I belive that should not happen having a delay of 1 minute.

Product feature suggestions don’t really belong in this forum, they should be directed at feedback@twitch.tv.

However, we appreciate your thoughtful suggestion, so I’ll go ahead and address it :slight_smile:

We currently stream over RTMP and so our player has no knowledge of past video. We are in the process of moving over to HLS to serve video, which serves streams in little 4 second chunks. Once we’ve finished this migration, it should be a piece of cake for us to add in this delayed stream mode functionality.