Twitch offers a great way for gamers to interact with one another … as long as you’re willing to put up with a lengthy video delay. But the livestreaming company is now making some improvements to that problem.
The top website for live gaming video has directly addressed video delays by upgrading its technology. Twitch admits this is an “impediment to seamless interaction” between the broadcaster and their viewers, and so it has reduced the length of the delays that most people will experience. Streamers now have a new option in their settings that drops the average length of the delay by about 33 percent when it’s toggled on. With well over 1 million people using the site to broadcast their PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and mobile gaming online, Twitch is well ahead of its competition and trying to address problems like this should help it maintain that lead.
“Based on community feedback, one of the major projects we have been working on over the last year is significantly reducing stream delay,” Twitch product marketing manager Georgia Price said. “This is a significant feature that should make Twitch’s social video experience more seamless.”
Twitch says that its engineers accomplished this improvement by breaking up video packets from 4 second segments to just 2 seconds. This drastically decreases the size of the data that goes through Twitch’s pipeline at one time.
The change is especially great for livestreamers who spend a lot of their broadcasts talking and interacting with people in chat. Just make sure you turn on the reduce-delay option before you start your stream or else it won’t take effect until the next time you start a Twitch session.
The reduced delay comes just after Twitch expanded its content to the Roku streaming set-top boxes. This means that people can get more immediate live gaming video on Roku, Chromecast, mobile, and most gaming consoles. If you have an Internet connected device, you probably have an easy way to watch Twitch.