After Microsoft bought the start-up Beam earlier in the year, it quickly announced plans to integrate it into Xbox One and Windows 10. This loudly signaled to Twitch and the more recently launched YouTube Gaming that it intended to shake up the competition. The latest update to this Microsoft service has brought a much needed improvement with its streaming quality: Beam now has support for data rates of up to 10 Mb/s and native resolutions of 2560 x 1440 at a magnificent 60 frames per second. The ability to create events to be done by multiple streamers has also been added, with other features to be revealed in the upcoming days.
Microsoft still has a lot to do in order to close in on its competition however; Amazon’s Twitch is still the juggernaut in the game streaming arena and YouTube is desperately trying to find its footing with YouTube Gaming. YouTube Gaming has one major important strength over Twitch however; it’s method of archiving its videos. The playback on YouTube is much easier than it is on Twitch, since YouTube can rewind live streams of up to 4 hours. Twitch on the other hand is often the go to game streaming service for professionals and amateurs alike.
The upgraded features to Beam Pro users are currently available, with the roll out for everyone else slated to arrive in 2017.
“We’re no longer the scrappy startup we were last year, and with the resources of Microsoft behind us, we’re going back to the basics and evaluating how we can make every aspect of the site more smooth, stable, and epic. Today, I’m extremely excited to announce that Pro users can begin testing an entirely new version of Beam, written from the ground up with scale in mind.”
