A YouTube built for gamers | Hacker News Reader

A YouTube built for gamers

googleblog.blogspot.com

192 pointscleverjake125 comments

I think this will be a successful for the following reasons:

Previous Twitch competitor (Owned3D) was successful in gaining viewership by poaching streamers from twitch with better deals.It seems like it was pretty easy for personalities to transfer their fan bases over. Many twitch streamers already post highlights of their streams to youtube so they've already established a presence there. I would also think that youtube will be better at serving video advertisements and handling copyrighted materials on stream (currently twitch handles copyrighted music by muting archived videos that contain it, whereas youtube places an advertisement for the song at the bottom of the video).

YouTube shuts down videos with footage Nintendo games in it automatically. They have an awful reputation for one sided copyright enforcement amongst game streamers.

YouTube does that at the request of Nintendo due to their ad revenue program[0]. You're leaving out a bit of important context that completely undermines your point.

The problems with Nintendo are not limited to the situation you describe, and they've made a few attempts to make it better and usually made it worse. The long and short of it is that Nintendo has a rather unique position in the industry that because they created the game, they are entitled to a kickback of revenue you make on your own content. If you are not enrolled, they treat it just like a Content ID claim, as if I were to upload my favorite album and attempt monetization.

Content creators and Nintendo do not get along in general. Ask Rooster Teeth, TotalBiscuit, PewDiePie, Angry Joe, and others. This has been extensively covered by everyone I named.

Back to the point, YouTube is entirely absolved of fault, and to claim otherwise betrays misunderstanding.

[0]: https://r.ncp.nintendo.net/guide/

I don't think the copyright law on who owns footage of games is entirely settled?

It really doesn't matter while the game companies as a whole have figured out that the best thing for their business is if the game is popular on Twitch equals a lot more sales. Once companies see streamer as hurting game sales that would make this an issue again.

> YouTube does that at the request of Nintendo due to their ad revenue program[0].

Agreed, but I left that out because I thought people on HN already know and expect Nintendo to be a bit over the top about 'protecting' their IP.

That doesn't mean Google have to kowtow to their demands, or that Google don't have the power to defend Youtube game streamers.

> YouTube shuts down videos with footage Nintendo games in it automatically

No it doesn't. It has an awful reputation for Nintendo games because if you enable monetization on a stream of a Nintendo game, Nintendo takes all ad revenue unless you join their "Nintendo Creators" affiliate program.

And I'm not sure what you mean below about YouTube could be defending streamers. Streaming games isn't at all established as fair use, and odds point to it not actually being transformative enough for them to be (nearly everyone's arguments revolve around streaming being a huge benefit for game sales so companies should allow streamers to make money off them to motivate them).

What YouTube does with copyrighted music depends on what the rights holder tells them to do. Most of the time in Germany the video is just unviewable. I'd rather prefer muted instead of unable to watch.

Would be interesting if YouTube allowed users to upload videos with dual audio tracks or something, or as you said, mute the video altogether (which at times they do - but I guess not when it's a region based block).

Own34 was first it actually was Justin.tv/Twitch.tv poaching streamers from Own3d. Own3d had a money problem with not enough income and more money going out due to popularity. Streamers were owed tens of thousands of dollars when they closed up shop.

Agreed, Its a brilliant move by YouTube, I am surprised they didn't bring this earlier. People were already using YouTube to show their game footage for a long long time.

I don't understand why Google can not roll this out internationally from the start. Why only US and UK?

The content is not subject to old copyright contracts, which is typically the argument not to launch something in Europe and its crazy copyright situation. And twitch is available everywhere.

If Google wants this to become a success, shouldn't they roll this out to as many people as possible and hope for network effects?

I don't understand either. It seem like Google thinks people only speak the language from where they connect.

Ex: Youtube keeps suggesting me German videos even if all my accept-language headers and settings are set to en-US.(I'm in Switzerland, speak French). Also, you only see populars videos from your country. Wich makes no sense when the total population is less than Paris.

Seems like Google started segregating content by location and country language, it's sad and arbitrary.

Fair-use is not a universal thing. The US has it but Germany for example doesn't. In these countries things like Let's Plays are copyright violations.

Maybe because their algorithms to organize the videos by game and type have only been optimized for English US and UK submissions.

Unlikely. Many european gamers from various countries game exclusively in english, since that is the original language for almost all games. Heck, the most famous game streamer is a Swede and all of his content is in (horribly squeaky) english.

Only AAA titles are translated into anything but English, and even those are just translated into a handful of languages.

I know people from all over Europe, they all expect gaming content to be English.

I'm Norwegian, but I run all my software in English. Linux distributions are the only ones having trouble with my 'strage' locale and language setup, but that's fully due to incompetent devs.

this would explain why there are only submissions in english. But not why those submissions are blocked in other countries.

> Why only US and UK?

At the very least: translation?

Pretty much none of the games streamed on Twitch are translated into anything else than perhaps German and French and that somehow doesn't make them block the whole world from seeing the streams.

I really doubt the target demographic for this needs translations...

How is the copyright situation in Europe crazier than in the US? (genuine question)

Many countries with their own individual licenses

Perhaps they want to test it first before rolling it out worldwide?

Youtube's goal would be to get people over to their gaming product instead of heading over to twitch. Plans for monetization come later. That should not be a concern considering twitch does not stream properly for many users. My friends on Steam share the same opinion (At least the ones in Asia).

Streaming any game in real time and getting enough folks to watch it is still a problem that needs a solution with more polish. Twitch does not keep up and `Steam streaming` does not work half the time. I'd stream games on gaming.youtube.com if they did a better job at it and have a product focused around that.

I can foresee a future where youtube can get those eyeballs on `gaming.youtube.com` instead of twitch.tv. Youtube is already popular for gaming reviews.

Streaming a game in real time with low bandwidth requirement is a problem we've had a solution to since the dawn of multiplayer games but that seems to have been forgotten in modern games: Spectator mode.

You use your game client to connect to the same server that the actual game is playing on, only receive the small packets of player information and then render it locally.

This will of course eventually also overload the server with enough spectators but some kind of forwarding proxy should be able to solve this easily.

Voice commentary and a professional host choosing the best camera angle is still missing but this is also something that could be embedded into the game if the game developers really wanted to.

not really an option since it would require that the viewers have the game installed. It's a complete other format for shows that focus on a single game. It seems overkill to burden the viewers with dedicated clients (and a step backwards?) for a problem on the side of the streamer.

A dedicated client is a lot of effort, but also gives way more options for viewers. IMHO it is a thing for a different audience: It's great for games the viewer is highly invested in and also plays, but a giant hassle for casual viewing. Outside of a few special examples it probably doesn't pay off.

A player broadcasting his view has value of its own. In League of Legends, we don't see the player's perspective in spectator mode. We don't see what they type in team chat. We don't hear what they're saying.

A dedicated client has its benefits as well for the same reasons. You can change the view and look at things from different perspectives or look at places that the streamer (who is not necessarily the player I guess) is not looking at.

You can expect most interested watchers to already have the game installed since they play it themselves.

But yeah, it's no silver bullet for sure. A common problem with older games that had this feature was that stored replays of matches wasn't compatible with newer versions of the game.

That already happens in a number of games. Notably Dota2 has had millions of viewers watching via game client for their large tournaments.

Would be interesting if there was a game-independent spectator protocol. Hmm.

Not really since you'd still need the game assets.

A huge problem is bandwidth, especially if you need to play a game like an online first person shooter which needs every bit of bandwidth it can get.

Online games don't normally need much bandwidth since they're just communicating the player's positions, velocity gunfire etc. None of that data is particularly big. Latencies on the other hand are really important.

This was about streaming video of such games. Not every viewer watches from within those games. And for the video with lots of fast movements and reactions you'll certainly need bandwidth.

I don't understand what is the difference between streaming a programming class and gaming (first person shooting for example) ? (say we can have a minimum frame rate for both , like 30), is there anything other than a pure video ? as you said no one watch video from inside game (at least we are not talking about it)

p.s. sorry , I got my answer from someone else's comment , latency is problem , no one care if video starts 500ms late , but this is huge problem in gaming streaming.

That's not the only reason. I am not expert by any stretch, but I believe video codecs work by essentially storing diffs of different frames rather then the entire frame. I imagine in a programming class, a large portion of the screen will not need to be redrawn very frequently (background of slides, things on the wall of a classroom, etc.). However a fast moving FPS will constantly need to redraw almost everything in the environment. So that would necessarily require a lot more throughput per frame.

A huger problem is copyright nonsense. If Google allows e.g. automated takedowns of gamer video because there's music playing somewhere in the background no amount of video streaming virtuosity will work.

And the background music is a pretty huge deal for all streamers I watch on Twitch (I'm a daily visitor.) Almost every game streamer displays a marquee-like box showing the details of the current track.

There are also music streams on Twitch, wonder what Google will do with them.

Google is capable of removing sound and retaining video

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It took long enough for Google to cater to gamers. After Twitch was acquired for a large sum of money, it was only a matter of time before Google decided to go after gamers. Most gamers have Youtube presences anyway, if Google can take all of the great features and things gamers like about Twitch and then add some additional features on-top, it'll be a success for them no doubt.

Curious why they're launching in the US and UK first though. Couldn't find anything that explained why the delayed release, surely it's not because of copyright reasons.

The major hurdle is goning be cultural rather than tech or features.

Youtube comments vs. Twitch audience

Twitch has already won over most of the potential audience for computer game streaming. Computer gamers tend to be a loyal bunch, and they know that Twitch is a site by and for gamers. If I had to guess, YouTube Gaming will have trouble making headway.

The problem is Twitch infrastrucutre is not good enough to stream properly in many countries. A 1080p/60fps stream has only about a 6Mbit bitrate but in Australia will not work, even on a connection ten times as fast. Plus, without a special agreeement that only top streamers have, Twitch takes 50% of subscription money - I'm sure Google can afford smaller margins to lure streamers over.

The problem they will face is not that gamers are loyal so much as for many people "live video game broadcast" is Twitch, so people are unlikely to notice live streams if they're elsewhere. This is solvable though - most streamers upload their VODs to YouTube anyway so they can easily notify users when a streamer is live.

1) I'm sure with Amazon's resources behind them, Twitch will get their infrastructure up to snuff in more remote regions of the world.

2) Amazon could surely afford to compete with Google on sub share % if need be. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of offering a higher sub share. It's (sub share) * (# of subs). Twitch has a very good head start on the latter.

As someone lives in Asia currently , I can approve this completely , I am watching videos from YouTube without any lag or any other problem , but believe me , watching videos from twitch is completely nightmare (at least for me)

You are confusing megabits and megabytes. You likely read that it requires minimum 6 megabytes per second to stream 1080p/60fps. That would be 42 megabits. And that is a minimum. Depending on your settings you could need much more then that. Not to mention Australia has notoriously bad internet in general.

I have 150/50 fiber internet in brazil -- 50% of the time, i cannot watch a 1080p twitch stream, while i can watch a youtube livestream.

twitch infrastructure is notoriously bad for anyone that is not american.

Often twitch gets terrible for me until I load a VPN, and I'm in America. They're probably getting screwed on peering.

No, it's six megabit. You can right click on a stream and choose "playback stats" and it will give you a live bitrate as well as some other details. On my connection I can comfortably stream 4K YouTube or Netflix, but Twitch shits itself at anything more than 720p.

It's like butchers and supermarkets... The butchers, they can't compete. It seems doomed to be centralized. They're not creating another service as much as they're organizing their supermarket.

I'd guess Google should buy Twitch then but I'm just a coder not a business person.

It's almost sure that they tried, but the deal didn't go through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv#Acquisition_by_Amazo...

I see, we just noticed the story on Roku Technology News this morning too, didn't realize Google did try to buy them. In that case, it makes complete sense, thanks.

At least in terms of the esports streaming component people will go to wherever the big events are happening.

Fro a Dota perspective competition like MLG, Hitbox, DailyMotion and Azubu have gone down the path of getting exclusive events and a lot of the audience generally follows.

There is also the massive Chinese market which is generally siloed from the rest of the world.

One thing other sites struggle with is getting the same Chat experience that a lot of people like from Twitch for big events.

People aren't going to stop watching their favorite personalities just because they switch to YouTube. The only thing YouTube has to do is convince some big names that they can make more money on their site. And that should be easy to do, if it is in fact true. A couple of small streamers are surely going to try it, and if they report good results, more and more people will switch.

Twitch's priorities aren't exactly spectacular, considering how they switched streaming backends in a way that moved them from 5-8 second latency to 30ish second latency (or more, sometimes stretching to minutes). They've improved it over time but that transition was pretty awful for any channel that interacts directly with chat.

I think one way Twitch could lose me is if YouTube figures out discovery. I cut the cord and as odd as this sounds I will plop down on the couch with dinner and check out what's on Twitch. The UIs I see are focused on popular games as opposed to what might be most interesting (to me) going on right now.

Twitch is "good enough" but if YouTube Gaming essentially can provide better streams, people will switch.

Twitch recently banned adult content. Meaning games with nudity and violence (like Hatred) are not allowed.

Not sure Gamers like that whole censorship thing. Ask yourself why GTA is the best selling game on Steam, while constantly being shit on by both the Social Justice Left and the Christian Right.

So how does Hacker News think that Twitch and YouTube Gaming are going to work with VR. Seeing the gamer and their reactions is part of the appeal of Twitch, but that changes with VR where you can't see someone's eyes.

Amazon (who paid nearly $1 billion for Twitch) and Google really believe there is a real future watching people play games, but one real challenge seems to be the VR integration.

The other replies are missing barney54's point: that streamers wearing VR goggles will have their faces obscured.

Personally, I'm not sure this will be a big deal, since the VR content itself should be more interesting. And if you care, the lower half of the face will still be visible anyway.

A LOT of facial expression is given off from our eyes and surrounding muscles.

What might be cool tho, is being able to stream the complete VR sphere so the viewers could look behind and around and just be within the streamers control.

YouTube already has 360 degree video. How much bandwidth could 360degree streaming possibly take?

Youtube has mono 360 videos and they are build ahead of time, true stream 360 is not out of reach but gonna take a lot more bandwidth.

4 times the bandwidth of regular streaming I would guess - the equivalent of one stream in each direction.

If we are talking about the 360 video rig announced a bit back, its more like 8 since we don't have 180 degree FOV cameras.

VR at present is of no immediate concern, as it's simply barely available yet, and games aren't yet robustly supporting it.

But even going forward I'd posit that it'll only occupy a (small) niche. Consoles are going to have trouble supporting it -- not due to their never being "powerful enough" (as consoles will of course get more powerful over successive generations) but rather simply due to the power disparity needed to render a game normally vs VR. Developers aren't going to want to release a game at vastly lower detail settings for VR than for general TV-based consumption (and they won't forgo the TV-based audience, except perhaps for niche lower-budget VR-only titles).

Moreover, some of the most popularly streamed titles (anything not first person -- League of Legends, Hearthstone, etc.) are simply not suitable for VR.

People forget that many genres of games will never make it to VR in any meaningful way. Even in a far-future holodeck scenario, strategy games don't change a whole lot.

But it's true that VR is an immersive experience which I can't vicariously participate in the same way I can watch someone playing Hearthstone now. In many ways VR games are likely to remain largely unsuitable for streaming.

> Even in a far-future holodeck scenario, strategy games don't change a whole lot.

I dunno, the classic Civilization style could benefit quite a bit from it. Imagine having a virtual giant globe that you can arbitrarily turn and zoom as the main interface.

Even the limited number of platformers with a third-person view on the Oculus Rift hardware are quite successful, since the false depth perception helps with fine control.

When they stream VR, everyone will be watching it from their own VR headsets. Think of horror games done this way.

How do you think VR will change streaming? The developer versions of oculus are already just an oddly rendered 1080p video stream; You can play back a recorded oculus video stream to the glasses, and it's a little weird because you're not moving your head as the perspective changes, but not actually that bad.

If you're looking for something more interactive, replay videos already exist for a wide variety of games, with the ability to change perspectives. Simply mapping the full system state to a local engine for rendering will allow you to view any perspective of the VR game character. You move your head, the perspective changes, but the 'body' of your character is still in the streamer's control.

I don't think seeing someones _eyes_ matters that much. Reactions are much more than that. One of the most popular streamers (Lirik) does not use a camera at all, so all you get is his voice and the gameplay.

VR itself is a bit different though, as not everyone will have Rift/etc, so either you are streaming to a very limited audience, or there has to be a way of capturing the footage before it's transformed, and even then, it's just one eye, so the viewers are missing stuff.

I don't think that streaming to YouTube is as easy as direct streaming to Twitch, maybe that's one of the areas they are focusing on.

Streamers will make sacrifices for their audience. If the technology isn't available to stream VR well then they won't do it.

What would be really cool is a game that supports streaming to YouTube 360, where it records a view similar to what the Jump camera rig does in real life.

The money isn't in the ads or the subscriptions it is in the tips. I wonder if they have a system for that.

Youtube already has that. It's called "Fan funding":

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052077?hl=en

Wow. That is incredibly half-assed considering how important it should be.

The contrast with twitch's system or with patreon or kickstarter could not be larger.

Out of curiosity, what does Twitch do differently than this?

They have a big sub button, and give streamers tools to modify the experience for subs. You can give them sub only emotes that they can use everywhere, or you could put your chat in sub only mode, or you could make recorded videos that are sub only.

Even that is not coming close to realizing the potential of such crowdfunding, but it beats a random tip button that sometimes doesn't even show up.

well to be fair subscriptions != donations

Twitch doesn't make any money from streamer tips as most of that is done through a link to PayPal. Twitch has no tip system.

Popular streamers like Lirik have said they much prefer getting a subscription through Twitch than a donation as it's much more reliable. Some streamers like Summit1G probably does make way more money through tips because of their personality some people just throw money at them, but again none of that goes to Twitch.

Ehm, twitch has it's own donation system (which works trough paypal) e.g.: https://www.twitchalerts.com/donate/tsm_theoddone (and ofc boobies!) https://www.twitchalerts.com/donate/pink_sparkles

If you use a paypal link they also get the referrer unless you simply post your PP email and make people doit manually, but since the introduction of TA i think that's against the EULA.

Except that https://twitchalerts.com is not affiliated with Twitch, it's unsure if they have a deal to get some of the revenue.

They take 1% of the donations.

Yes, twitchalerts does. Not Twitch.

What do you mean by "ofc boobies" ? Having trouble getting something constructive out of that.

Do not assume PayPal is not kicking back a % of donations to Twitch. PayPal does this for e-commerce platforms that make PayPal integrations easy. For some e-commerce platforms this hidden cut of PayPal's transaction is their largest revenue stream.

They don't make it easy, broadcasters just add a link in their profile. There's no information transmitted to PayPal about the donation being for Twitch broadcasting. In fact a lot of broadcaster use third party tools, tools not made by Twitch or PayPal, for the donation system so that it updates in their stream and chat.

I'm glad to see competition in the space, but I have to admit that I read this article as, "We at Google noticed that Twitch was gaining quite a bit of traction, so we decided to use our behemoth size to see if we could successfully copy them.".

I think Google might be starting to get scared. There are many threats to their search and web advertising hegemony, including Apple's announcement to include an ad blocker in iOS9. Google is quickly realizing that their long term survival might be in YouTube.

Am I the only one that dislikes twitch because you need adobe flash player to do anything and is on generally a javascript bloated website?

Have you tried using livestreamer? You can just ignore the bloated website and watch streams in vlc with it.

It also allows me to have my 30 tabs open and watch a stream on the second monitor without troubling firefox.

Had no idea this exists, thanks!

When watching streams, put /popout at the end of the URL. It'll strip away the navigation and chat (basically everything but the video player.)

The player itself requires Adobe flash to run and I haven't had that installed since youtube started experimenting with HTML5.

I've done a lot of bitching about small websites where the devs didn't bother to test in Firefox. But from Google? Seriously?

Context:

https://gaming.youtube.com/coming_soon

Their coming soon page is a mess under Firefox.

The problem i see is that Twitch already has a very strong culture in the gaming community. You see Twitch emotes being used everywhere on the internet and i started seeing people on my campus use it on everyday language. I know its silly, but the chat and all the "underground" culture around it is a major player in Twitch's success.

Kappa!

First time I hear of Twitch, but I watch a lot of those play-through videos on Youtube (20 minutes of that crap saves me days of wasting money and time playing the actual game :-D)...

Imagine how would it all play out if game producers enforced their copyright as strictly as Hollywood or Music industry does.

Namely no game footage allowed unless you pay as as much as we want because it's derived work.

I doubt there'd be Twitch or YouTube Gaming.

Its all about the money they are willing to invest. If streamers with a viewership of 2-3k people on twitch can maintain/increase their income they will probably inclined to leave twitch.

And on the other side you need culture to make it work. Aliases instead of real names / emotes etc.

It will be a success the viewer base of yt in every demographic is to big but maybe not in the ballpark google wants it. Twitch will survive this and has to innovate which they dont really do atm.

So will the auto tag and transfer old videos with gaming content to the new site? Will uploading gameplay content on regular YT be prohibited than?

I would prefer if YT stay one entity and Google should just improve their "Search" on Youtube! It's weird that the search on Google in the video tab is a lot better than the search on Youtube directly. Youtube search functionality hasn't been improved since 2005 or so.

One thing that would be neat is if google rolled out their own streaming software. I've streamed a little on twitch for fun (mostly programming and some gaming) and I found all of it pretty bad.

Another neat thing is how much Replay value people's streams could get instantly being on youtube. I just checked twitch, and nobody really watches previously recorded streams. The most watched recorded videos this month in Gaming Talk Shows was only a little over 1000, while League of Legends most was in the 400s. Maybe youtube can really increase and monetize that for streamers.

I would also be super interested in streaming other things too, which is just now starting to get popular on twitch. I would love to be able to stream me programming and interact with other computer folk that way. I've done it on twitch but didn't stick with it long enough to really give it a chance.

I was previous streams all the time, since I'm usually available when my favorite streamer is. It's also kind of convenient because you can skip around to the good parts. The one thing I really hate missing is the chat though. I wish they'd save chat history and show it alongside saved streams.

try this extension ReChat for Twitch™ https://www.rechat.org/

Streamers already use YouTube by editing their VODS into more digestible pieces rather than have one long X hour recorded stream.

I don't see it succeeding unless they get Riot Games to exclusively stream on YouTube. That amount of views League of Legends brings to Twitch is crazy.

Google can do some exclusives for tournaments and I have to imagine they are already in talks with some top streamers on Twitch to come to YouTube.

This would be a good time to be a streamer with a lot of fans to get in a little bidding war between Amazon and Google.

Amazon doesn't have YouTube's experience, and is somewhat short-sighted when it comes to catering to content creators. Maybe Twitch employees could help.

Riot already streams LCS on youtube.

Haven't been following LCS for 2 years or so, but they used to stream it on multiple platforms at the same time.

I don't think Google can pay RIOT enough to go exclusive, especially since they need to be able to stream and get revenue from multiple regions, especially China.

I don't doubt that this will gain at least some traction. You can never count Google out. But it is somewhat disappointing to see Google, which used to pride itself on innovation, making dim copies of others' products long after the market has been invented and grown.

I'll stick with Twitch.

> But it is somewhat disappointing to see Google, which used to pride itself on innovation, making dim copies of others' products long after the market has been invented and grown.

It is somewhat disappointing to see people constantly complain about the cross-pollination of ideas.

Based on the post it doesn't appear that this is a quantum leap inspired by Twitch. It's a dim copy, an also-ran. The only reason it has any hope at all is because Google is behind it.

I hope they make official streaming clients to make the process much easier. I had issues with streaming Mac OS with both sound as well as microphone input.

Would also like to see a #GameDev channel. Was pretty cool to see Unreal show their stuff over Twitch.

Do we still need G+ to comment on YouTube Gaming ?

Will make you use your real name? If so I don't see this going very far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com