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We care a lot about stream quality at Twitch. Can I ask where you're watching from that you get so many stutters? That's a key metric we measure ("buffer empties per hour"), so I know for a fact it's not high everywhere.

For me, it's not stuttering but rather YouTube streams perform better given the same quality setting. For example, my connection sometimes fails to smoothly serve 1080p60 on Twitch yet handles YouTube's 1080p60 pretty well.

I wonder if that's because YouTube uses adaptive streaming, so it may continue to show you "1080p" content, but with slightly fewer bits of data to accommodate the decline in internet speed.

How does that work? Different compression levels?

I live in San Jose.

I'll say this much: I appreciate that you tried to release 1080p60, but I am yet to see it succeed. I was watching the "Clash for Cash" between Virtus.Pro and Astralis the other day (Friday?), and it was in 1080p60 on both YT and Twitch.

I eventually left your service to go to YouTube to watch there, because it was stuttering to the point of un-watchability on Twitch, and buttery smooth on YT.

unless you're talking about mobile you can use streamlink (or livestreamer) + mpv (or vlc) and all your problems will go away

you might need to tweak the config a bit

I gave up using Twitch on a browser, it just sucks (and they keep adding more bloat, weird page refreshes that often load the videos twice, notifications that I have to close every single time unless I'm keeping their cookies permanently)

Those stutter too all the time, chunks of video get skipped, etc. If your link to twitch is not good enough, `livestreamer` won't help very much. Though this is infinitely better than twitch player that can't even hide its controls reliably.

I don't know the technical details but for me and everybody else I ever recommended it always fixes the stutters. Multiple ISPs and computers were tested too. Maybe it's because I'm not from the US?

One thing I'm sure is that it uses way less CPU and helps with my ISP throttling because anything 720p60 and above is a problem if I'm using a browser.

There are options to modify the buffer, reconnect and more but I almost never change my config except for hls-live-edge like once a year (for something that is not Twitch).

Already-open pages are supposed to start playing when the streamer goes live, right? Because it's been very consistently not doing that.

My consistent experience is that Twitch's video quality isn't as crisp as Youtube's for a given bitrate particularly around the 480-720 region, which is important for me when watching something like Dota on my TV. Although I have a ~5.5Mbit connection, I've sometimes noticed times when 720p will buffer on Twitch but not on Youtube due to my internet being right on the tipping point of being able to stream each. Right now it's holding up fine, pulling ~450KB/sec for 720p60. I'm in Brisbane, Australia.

When the Dota International is on in August, I encourage you to boot up both Youtube and Twitch side by side and have a look at the visual quality at certain bitrates.

I'm also Australian, and cannot watch 720p60 on Twitch. 16mbps downstream over ADSL2+ in Melbourne.

720p60 is fine on YouTube. 1080p60 on YouTube will stutter depending on what my girlfriend is doing on the Internet, but is watchable if I'm home alone.

Anything over 720p60 won't even try to start playing on Twitch.

I'm one of the Lucky Few who have real NBN (100mbit down). YouTube 1080p60 is fine, but Twitch and Mixer seem to be coming from Hong Kong and stutter / drop out.

My primary problem with twitch streams is that even though I can easily get all the 1080p60 bytes onto my machine, the bloody web player can't keep up. My fans spin at max speed, and eventually it starts dropping frames.

Contrast that to running it in unstream (the windows app). Absolutely no problems. Hell I'm pretty sure my iphone can run the Source level streams better than Chrome on my macbook pro.

I'm not sure what the state of hardware accelerated video on OSX is, but at least on Linux Firefox doesn't support hardware decoding while Chromium does, and that leads to a 20% vs 5-10% CPU usage while watching Twitch source streams for me.

Not too long ago I did a check, was doing Twitch on Chrome / Macbook, and the thing just drained power. Turns out they were still using a Flash player, with a HTML5 player - which worked just fine and at a fraction of the power usage - an optional beta feature that I only managed to somehow activate using the browser's dev tools.

I hope the html5 player is the standard now.

Yes, the HTML5 player is now standard; Flash is only used as a fallback if HTML5 is not available.

Try Streamlink! Then you can watch the stream through VLC or any other player.

I live in South Africa. I can stream 1080p from YouTube with no issues, but Twitch is usually one of two outcomes: stuttering/lag across all browsers or, since the auto quality feature has been implemented, jumping between 720p and 144p, constantly adjusting quality.

Occasionally I can watch 720p just fine, but this is rare. I've resorted to watching tournaments like TI on YouTube, with the Twitch chat popped out for extra entertainment.

Same in Australia (except with 100 mbps down)

I live in South Africa and have the same experience.

I have tried to watch the LoL LCS numerous times using Twitch over the years, with stuttering/lag making it unwatchable.

I solely watch it on Youtube now.

Same in Belarus (but both iPad and PS4 Twitch apps handle 720p just fine on the same network).

For some reason, your website interface is the problem, both on firefox and chrome for me. I know it's the website and not my connection because apps like Orion are able to play your streams at the highest bandwidth setting flawlessly for me.

I think one huge difference between Twitch and YouTube is that the CEO of Twitch will still personally respond to someone on HN when they have troubles streaming :'D

Google UX design in general, across all their products, is user hostile garbage. Obsessed with minimalism, taking away options and features, shoehorning everything into cross-product bland design themes, cross promoting products, preferring algorithms over humans, basically designed with Google's interests above the user's everytime.

I like their current Maps app on Android a lot. Especially compared to Waze. It has a habit of popping up contextual info at the right time, and always seems to have way more data on any given location that I am 100% comfortable with, but am thankful its there anyway.

Given, that is the exception. They just - for some bizarre reason - broke their own material design guidelines in the youtube app by moving the tabs bar to the bottom and coloring it white like its an iOS app. It is now a disgusting blemish on the UI, makes no sense, isn't ergonomic at all, and violated their own design rules. And they didn't even add anything with it. They just moved the bar for no good reason and infinite bad ones.

The later seems to be way more the status quo than the former, sadly. The designers at Google seem to be locked into one project, and then they overengineer and reinvent the app every single year to justify their jobs, while breaking UX and alienating users.

I hope I am not jinxing Google Maps here - it got overhauled like two years ago into its current state. If its "due" to be redesigned from scratch again, and they break or take away a majority of the features that make it useful now, I'm going to be sad, because there is no real competitor to the density of information Google has.

Not that it makes the practice any better but the bottom navigation bar is in fact part of Material Design: https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation..... It is also used in Google+ and Google Photos. The bottom-nav-vs-no-bottom-nav design trend seems to reverse frequently though. The bottom bar will probably be removed again in a year or two.

That's interesting, I wonder if Google Maps is different on iOS, where I use it – I find it utterly infuriating. Like most of us I'm plenty tech savvy and have used Google Maps since its inception. Using the latest app is the only time I ever barbarically scream at my phone. It does maddening things like make the "place info" pane (store info, hours, etc.) impossible to get back to if I do something like pan around the map a little (to see what else is near my destination) – so I have to cancel the entire search and start over just to get it back...somehow the obvious action of tapping the goddamn waypoint marker doesn't do it. There's also something that happens when navigation is active that makes the stop/X button completely disappear with no obvious way to get it back; I have to re-discover it every time after yelling at my phone for a minute to shut up/stop navigating. Just thinking about this app pisses me off. There are a dozen other little things. It's so bad.

As someone who switched from Android to iOS in the last year or so but who tries to remain in the google sphere of apps, they mostly all feel like they are 2-3 years behind the equivalent Google versions. A lot of that comes down to iOS not treating google apps/services as first-class citizens and the lack of interoperability between the different apps that are baked into android, but the apps themselves also suffer.

That being said, there are very few (are there any?) other companies out there that would be capable of creating as much parity across platforms as Google has, so even though there are still problems, I still salute them for their efforts.

Maps is already garbage. It should never pop up extra information during navigation, it's dangerous. I manually pick routes a lot. Sometimes they're not there fastest. While I'm driving, it will constantly tells me it found a faster route, and the only way to stop it from switching is to hit a button.

I actually like algorithms over users. Governments and businesses have time and time again asked Google to censor this, make exception that, etc - and they have given in here and there, but in a lot of cases they've been able to shift the blame from people to The Algorithm. As in, if the algorithm thinks your competitor's site is more relevant than your own, stop whining and make a better website (for example).

I tried to print an email from inbox on iOS for the first time yesterday.

What a silly idea; why would anyone want to do that?

Works fine from desktop, so +1 for consistency. /s

Now try saving an email as a file

I wanted to forward a mail in the gmail app just now and accidentally hit "ignore" while looking for the option.

Took me 15 minutes to find the damn thing again. :p

I've found that third party applications like Orion are far better UI wise than Twitch. The twitch web interface always felt clunky to me. I don't know how they managed to mess up the interface but Orion (a desktop app) plays the video streams far better with no weird lags or stutters.

You can get the source here: https://github.com/alamminsalo/orion

or just google "Orion Twitch" if you want compiled binaries.

I have no affiliation with Orion, just a satisfied user.

The only complaint I have against the twitch UI is recent, and that's the idiotic "unread message" indicator every time I log on trying to sell me prime. No. Fuck off. At this point I'm less likely to buy prime because of this.

Other than that it does everything I want. Shows me all the active streams of a game I like, lets me follow people I like and get alerts when they're streaming. And the video content plays pretty well. My main remaining complaint is that they'll run adverts over active content - which is infuriating.

One huge advantage YouTube has over Twitch is that it ties your existing YT channel to the streaming UI. So for instance, when a huge YT personality like pewdiepie streams, his subscribers will be notified directly and don't need to go to another website to watch and participate in the chat. Also, AFAIK, YouTube has a donation and subscriber system in place so YouTubers can earn more while they stream.

The Youtube notifications are absolutely terrible though. They stick around after the streamer is done, so every time I open YouTube I get notifications like "someone is live!" when the stream ended 8 hours ago.

They stick around because by default ended streams hang around as a video and so you can watch it after the fact. Maybe they need to update the notifications so it can say "someone was live x hours ago"

Yeah but you don't seem to get notifications for people just uploading a plain old video either (at least not by default, unless I accidentally changed something).

I think there is a little bell icon next to the subscription button. If you check it videos send notification too. There is an option somewhere where you can choose which things send you notifications.

Are you sure that CS:GO isn't just a less popular game than it used to be? At least on the esports scene?

Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream, I find it hard to believe that people suddenly can't find tournament streams when there's already extremely limited options to do so.

Accepting my claim I've been watching for 1 year, when I got into it was slightly more popular than it is now, and during the middle of that time it did hit a very high peak [0].

>Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream

That's the whole point: it was previously 100% effortless. If livestreams were on, they were on Twitch. You would go to twitch.tv, click the icon for CSGO which was 100% guaranteed to be on the front page, and the top streams were talented/personable professional players and/or tournaments with significant prize pools.

After the deal ESL signed to start streaming CSGO on YouTube, the friction to finding a stream drastically increased (because it had previously been a URL navigation and two clicks until you were watching a stream). Then, YouTube's awful discoverability and UI/UX compounded the problem of finding streams on the new, secondary source, but that's assuming you actually knew the streams moved to YouTube and didn't just start going to Twitch and finding drastically less content, and gradually stop watching.

Now, I'm not going to pretend my words are gospel or anything, but it's of serious consideration that the aforementioned peak popularity occurred in mid-January, very close to when ESL started streaming on YouTube exclusively (Feb 7 being the actual date [1]). Of course, there was a major tournament during this time as well, but this was a great tournament that you wouldn't expect to drive population numbers down so drastically as they fell off afterwards.

For context: ESL is a very large player in the CS:GO scene, hosting plenty of tournaments, the most popular online league, and even Major tournaments (of which there are only a few a year with increased prize pools, the highest level of competition, additional other revenue for teams, and, less quantifiably, prestige for winning).

[0]: http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y [1]: http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-lea...

I am not disputing what you say, but for future reference you can create a bookmark that goes straight to the CS:GO channel. Or follow the channel so it's on your follow list all the time.

I do agree that the split has impacted CS:GO, but a few new releases have shaken up the top tiers. (Player Unknown's Battlegrounds for instance.)

I might be in minority, but at least I do not follow any tournament schedules. If I want to watch live stream I just pop over at Twitch and see what's on.

This is exactly what I did. I never go to YouTube to see what is on it is too hard to find what I want.

This comment thread is the only reason I know everything had moved to YouTube... I had been wondering where the hell all of the tournaments had gone for the last few months... Open Twitch, click CS:GO, see if there's anything on has been my flow for 2+ years.

Youtube's streaming is so laughable that youtubers will upload a video announcing that they are live on Twitch.

Laughable in what sense?

The feeling I've gotten is from watching both is that I prefer YouTube for the actual watching (streaming just seems to work better, especially with being able to rewind live streams).

But I still prefer twitch for discoverablity and just easier navigation. YouTube Gaming[0] works ok (though most people don't even know it exists), but they try to blend live and past events too much for me.

[0] http://gaming.youtube.com

The actual player on youtube streaming is wonderful. I can pause, rewind thirty seconds, watch that chunk again, then set my speed to 1.25x to catch up. You can't do that with twitch. You also can't show up 5 minutes late and watch from the start; anything between live and one-hour-delayed is a terrible experience.

Indeed. Also, the player is everywhere. YouTube tech seems better on this side, but it's only one half of the equation.

I enjoy twitch, even support a few streamers. Note, if you have Amazon Prime and a twitch account you can support a steamer for free.

Twitch did make a good move and similar to you I like watching better players at some of the games I have enjoyed. Yet for me the best feature of Twitch is to let me see some games I have yet to purchase to see if I would enjoy them.

> YouTube's discoverability is horrible

The is pretty much my opinion as well. Fortunately I use HLTV.org to find out where the games are streamed but yeah, this is the main problem with YouTube as it is right now.

It also misses the Clip feature where you can export a part of the stream as a video to share with others.

The player is great though, you can fast forward, rewind 30 seconds, it performs amazing even on low performance machine/connections.

Agreed, it's interesting that competitive differentiation can succeed based on having the lowest UX friction. Google knows how to optimize performance, but design can trump performance in certain areas. Certainly, Amazon knows how to make a performant site, but it's their adherence to customer experience that gives Twitch the edge here. My money is on Twitch.

Can you explain more about this "Live Now" - is that a YT icon or an uploader icon that goes on their videos?

It's a YT Icon that displays under live streams. The problem is, at least specifically in CS:GO, one of the companies who signed an exclusivity deal with YT loves to air reruns; this leads to YT recommending me to watch CS:GO that is LIVE NOW that is actually just a rerun being live-streamed by that company.

I guess you can see how that's not entirely YT's fault, but that doesn't make the end-user experience any better.

That was the same deal on twitch though with that group.

The last paragraph of this is the most valuable part of the TL;DR. Thank you for sharing anyway

Who watches twitch?

I mean this seriously; not as a dig. Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube? I may even watch a video if i see it when browsing.

But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun? How can you build a hugely expensive business off this? Is it all basically advertising for video games funded by companies?

I think it's more of an audience targeting thing, I'd guess there's not many people who are into competitive games and unaware of twitch.

For me personally, I watched twitch pretty regularly when Starcraft 2 was popular, to learn tips and tricks from players better than myself. It was more akin to watching game film than entertainment content to me.

When I was heavily into playing Hearthstone, I would regularly watch streams of players with better-than-average skill. It filled a niche for me, watching them judge circumstances and make good plays.

I did the same with Overwatch, only to a much lesser extent - I personally didn't like what was available at the time.

Yes, it's advertising.

A lot of popular games on Twitch are competitive games. Many amateur players watch skillful or professional players to increase their own skills.

Others watch the same way many people watch sporting teams compete. "who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun".. I suppose you haven't heard of the Superbowl, which sells ads for $5million USD

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/super-b...

Entertainment. Think sports for ~~nerds~~ gamers. Also... Some celebs* who like gaming stream as a way to connect w/ fans.

* https://dotesports.com/culture/15-celebrities-and-sports-pro...

Millions of people do? I do. There's a few reasons I do:

* Streamers connect with their audiences, I can chat with them live - ask questions about the game or technique

* Streamers are entertainers. They joke, cry, rage with you. They are engaging people.

* Community. I'm a subscriber to person X, so are you!

* Skill. Streamers are often the best in the world at their games.

* Can't play now. Cooking? Folding laundry? Watch some twitch.

* Events. Exports, and charity events like games done quick are amazing.

* Discoverability. Finding a new game or a new streamer for a game I like is super easy.

How do you build a business? Some streamers have thousands of people paying them $5 a month. Twitch takes a cut. They show ads, they collect donations, they sell in game products and the games themselves. (Twitch splits the revenue for those with their streamers. ) It's powered by viewers and ad revenue, is what I'd guess.

Ahah! So it's kind of like podcasting meets a "let's play"; makes sense.

But with real-time chat with the content creator!

How can you chat with your streamer when the live chat feed is a massive spam box due to the sheer volume of users? Unless of course you're watching the lesser known streamers.

Subscriber only mode on chat cuts back on the spam.

Steamers shape their communities. Even with 10k people watching, some have very civil chats.

I am confused about your purpose in this comment.

>Who watches twitch?

This is easy enough to answer; gamers / game enthusiasts.

But then you confound it by asking:

>Why be exclusive when everyone knows youtube?

I don't really follow at this point. I thought my post covered that; Twitch has great discoverability of live content, and so if I am trying to watch a CS:GO tournament, and they're all going to be on Twitch, I'll go to Twitch and watch...

If you're asking from a content-creator's perspective, I think I can answer that in one symbol: $

>But who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play games for fun?

"Who just watches OTHER PEOPLE play sports for fun?" Is that a dissatisfying parallel for you, or does it sufficiently illuminate the point?

Well, watching sports is equally confounding for me. Thanks; this answers my question!

Twitch isnt the new guy here

I'm 22 and have been watching twitch very regularly since I started college in 2013. I think my age group is the main demographic twitch targets, and I can say myself and many of my friends watch for the streamers and community more than the games themselves. Lirik, a streamer I have watched for years, is someone I would watch play literally any game due to how entertaining his personality is.

May be anecdotal, but many of my friends have the same mindset. Besides watching competitive eSports tournaments for specific games, usually someone will have a few streamers they will watch play anything.

You watch Lirik!?!? Come on man watch a R E A L streamer like GiantWaffle... People like you probably only have 908 friends on Facebook, like "wolf packs" and work for networking companies TriHard. Get on my level and call me :^)

For real though Twitch is <3 KappaPride

This comment was hilariously miscalculated.

Do you watch professional sports (football, basketball, etc)?

Watching competitive video games (starcraft 2 is my favorite) has a similar appeal, to me. If you don't watch any sports, than the appeal of esports may not make sense to you.

Of course, twitch is bigger than esports, but each viewer category has their own needs & content that fills them.

Lots of people watch Twitch. I'm a Starcraft fan and it's basically the only service I would use to watch streams. I might float over to YouTube if a user has a show, someone like Day[9].

Regarding ads there's a few different ways it happens. Sometimes the stream itself will have ads, this is most noticable with Korean content when they start putting up ads for Korean ISPs or mobile apps. The other way ads happen is through the Twitch platform itself and these are what you're most likely used to seeing on YouTube. Targeting is okay but not the best, solvable problem though.

eSports might seem like a joke still but I guarantee that a lot of people don't feel that way and follow them in the same way that football teams are followed. It's entertainment like any other.

It's just fun. It's not more complicated than that.

There's the trope of the younger sibling watching the older one play games, and it turns out that a lot of people enjoy that. You can watch for loads of different reasons:

* High-quality gameplay. Some of the most talented people in e-sports regularly stream, and most of the popular streamers are quite good generally.

* Introduction to games and critique. I definitely use Twitch to decide which games I'll buy and play.

* Streamer personalities. A lot of the streamers are very very good at what they do. They are funny and entertaining, can tell stories, and generally cultivate a community around their stream. They play off the drama of what they play (a big part of why battle royale games are so popular). It's weird how much watching a stream can feel like hanging out with friends.

It's one of those things where you might not understand unless you give it a try, and certainly not everyone will love it, but it's so damn compelling. I predict really big things for Twitch.

Professional sports, Pro Wrestling, Chess/Go, sports talk shows / talk shows in general, "celebrities playing sport xyz" all have elements of entertainment that are shared with game streaming as a form of entertainment.