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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 toppi

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.

minot 11y ago
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.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  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.
  - thezilch 11y ago
    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.
timr 11y ago
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.
- icebraining 11y ago
  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.
- thezilch 11y ago
  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 http://i.imgur.com/dcPoRui.png

minot 11y ago

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.

dogma1138 11y ago
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.
- thezilch 11y ago
  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.

timr 11y ago

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.

icebraining 11y ago
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.
thezilch 11y ago
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 http://i.imgur.com/dcPoRui.png