Once a week I find myself on the couch watching Twitch. Be it CS:GO, WoW, Overwtach, or Bob Ross, it’s a good 30 minutes of unwinding time. While watching competitive CS:GO matches, casters do a great job of calling the action and making it feel a little more sporty. When watching something like WoW or Overwtach, the individual streamer must keep the commentary going in order for it to be engaging. Sometimes that just isn’t enough.
Wouldn’t it be more entertaining, and certainly interactive, if I could toggle between all of the players on a team? Have the ability to listen to multiple voice channels at once (e.g. the entire team). Currently, you can do stuff like this in CS:GO, but that’s outside the context of Twitch and other streaming services.
Twitch needs to provide the ability to federate multiple streams into one channel, thus allowing those streamers to all work together. Viewers can then manage their experience how they want. Professional gaming teams would likely garner huge support by streaming their practice sessions.
Bandwidth wouldn’t be an issue because you’d down-sample outbound streams if the viewer was watching multiple players at once. Of course, server-side, the incoming stream would need to be sampled to multiple resolutions on the fly. That won’t be cheap for CPU resources.
In addition to multiple streams, Twitch (and other services) need to offer game developers the ability to stream raw map data to their servers. It’s one thing to see the action from the game players perspective, it’s entirely another to see the situation develop from a top-down perspective. Again, I take CS:GO as the prime example of how this technology could look. If gaming wants to get even more mainstream, streaming technology will need to continue to evolve.