Twitch will now let streamers simultaneously stream on any service they want
At first I was excited about hearing this, but there’s two big caveats to this:<p>1) Due to some odd wording in the terms of what’s permissible, your stream can’t be lower quality than what you send to other platforms. Because YouTube offers a higher ingestion bandwidth rate (10+ Mbps) than Twitch (6 Mbps), someone appealing to both services that wants to send the maximum bitrate allowed for quality purposes or even with differing resolutions can be hit due to the technicality:<p>> otherwise degrading, the video quality on Twitch so that it’s worse than on other platforms would make the user’s experience on Twitch less than other services and, therefore, not meet these guidelines.<p>2) A popular tool for streamers who aren’t bound by exclusivity (anyone not Affiliate/Partner before this came out) used Restream to both stream to multiple platforms as well as integrate a combined chatroom, for example mixing YouTube and Twitch chats, will have to stop doing so. This sucks for viewer interactivity and would be a net negative to smaller streamers:<p>> You do not use third-party services that combine activity from other platforms or services on your Twitch stream during your Simulcast, such as merging chat or other features, to ensure the Twitch community is included in the entirety of the experience of your livestream.<p>So, this feels more like a bait and switch to generate positive PR when a lot of the conversation toward Twitch has been negative the past year, and less of an omission of no longer being the top dog of gaming streaming.<p>Source: <a href="https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/simulcasting-guidelines" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/simulcasting-guidelines</a>