Microsoft acquires Beam interactive livestreaming service | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft acquires Beam interactive livestreaming service

blogs.microsoft.com

58 pointsconnor431217 comments

The CEO (one of the co-founders) is 18 years old – and already a prolific entrepreneur.[1] He did a great talk at TechCrunch Battlefield.[2]

Impressive work by the Beam team. I'm not a gamer (at all), and even I have way too much fun watching streams on Beam.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2016/beam/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRpgU2tTRWQ

> We’ve developed a world-first low latency streaming protocol built on top of WebRTC and VP8 to do stream delivery with sub-second latency to power the core of our platform.

Nice. Worked on something kinda like that a couple years ago.

> Would you rather have Gates, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “Zuckerberg, hands down. He has a unique global perspective on human interaction and communities. We function as an indirect social network for gamers, and Zuckerberg is the king of social.”

interesting.

I'd rank him 3rd. Course this guy grew up with Zuckerberg as king and gates running charities.

That was quick, Beam hasn't been around for very long. But they have innovative new stuff, where twitch has been kind of stagnating technically.

And access to Microsoft infrastructure and integration with their gaming platforms might help them grow. First stop: Minecraft integration.

Honest question: what innovative stuff does Beam have?

(Beam employee, views are my own)

The primary points relevant to the push for interactive content are:

- The "Interactive" system and SDK to develop and connect games to GUI controls. This allows first party to develop integrations, and also allows the creation of mods for existing games or integration via simple desktop automation.

- Extremely low latency (~200ms) video distribution at scale. Other services like Twitch have latency around ~10 seconds, at which interactivity would not be feasible.

Does video latency matter for most game streams? The games I watch on twitch are delayed to offset stream sniping.

As connor4312 write, it majorly hampers anything interactive. The 10-30 second latency has been a persistent issue throughout TwitchPlaysPokemon, for example. Beyond TPP's very special case, though, it means streamers who want to ask questions to their audience have to speak and then pause to give time for the stream to catch up before people start answering.

I've done a fair sum of game streaming. Latency really, really, really matters for interactivity. It's not like 10ms off we're talking here. Streams can drift really far out of realtime, I've seen 20+ seconds and that's on top of pre-designated stream delays.

Beam also is a lot more friendly to high quality video streamers.

What connor4312 said. For streamers that interact with their audience a lot, the low latency is important, because they can ask questions and chat can answer really quickly. On twitch that often is awkward because they have to wait until the questions reached everybody and the answers start to come in. And I think it works without Flash?

And the interactive features can be fun, e.g. one example I saw was a Minecraft stream were people could add challenges or give powerups to the individual streamers. Not my cup of tea, but I can see why people love it.

Twitch has released a beta HTML5 player to paid users, but that was relatively recently (I think last month)

Congrats to Beam but I will admit it's kinda sad since the chances of the PS4 ever getting an option to stream to Beam are now pretty much 0.

The endgame is likely native TwitchPlaysPokemon-esque experiences for Xbox One / Windows 10, something which Sony/Nintendo definitely will not be able to do as easily. (streamer/viewer interaction + Minecraft could make things crazy)

(Beam employee, views are my own)

That's the plan. As part of Xbox we'll have a lot more resources to build those kinds of integrations; as of yet _most_ of our resources have been developed to building the core streaming platform -- video distribution, chat, various third party integrations, and other miscellaneous features. Interactive will definitely continue to expand and increase in pace over the coming months.

Xbox is on fire this year

Not to be confused with Beme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beme

how much did ms paid for this?

Already?! Jesus.

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