this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Twitch is trash. Everywhere I've been, 1080p isn't stable. As soon as I switch over to youtube, 1080p works fine. And their stupid "loading stream UwU" screen when loading it on another page is just annoying.
It also misses the absolutely basic feature or scrubbing - I can't rewind or click back to a previous point in the stream - no. For that, the stream has to have recording activated, then you need to know of
/videoson the streamer's page, and finally you can open the "recording". And because it's a recording, you can't "go to live". It jumps back to the very beginning of the stream when it gets to the end "end of the recording", which is whenever you opened it --> opened it 1 hour ago? Once it hits that point again, (no, notlive - 1hourbutlive - 2 hours), it reloads and now you have to remember that it waslive - 2 hours.It's just shit.
There's no excuse for it being that bad either. The parent company literally runs one of the biggest cloud/CDNs in the world (AWS).
Well, the primary focus of the platform is the fact that it's meant to be live, not on-demand. Everything else takes a backseat.
I replay stuff all the time. Especially during live tournaments and a caster missed something, I scrub back to the point, watch it at a different speed, then hit live again. Or if I go to the loo and don't want to miss an important fight, pause, loo, scrub back a little to the beginning of the fight, then hit live.
It's so basic. Any tournament organiser that's twitch exclusive, I don't watch and just wait for the highlights.
I get that, because I'm the same way with my media consumption. But that just means that Twitch isn't for you. There's a whole market of people who appreciate the fact that if you missed something, you missed it for good, and that's the primary audience Twitch is meant to serve.
You're right. It's why I don't use Twitch much.
YouTube streams are so good. Google really has the video streaming tech stack nailed
Yep, Twitch isn't for me because YouTube has these braindead basic features already.
I watch a lot of twitch, probably more than I should honestly, and while the platform has problems it's really not that bad. I rarely ever have issues with 1080p streams, honestly basically never. They don't really ever buffer or stutter at all. So I don't know where that issue is coming from for you. I can watch multiple 1080p60 streams in parallel just fine. Typically watching multiple perspectives of the same game, none of them buffer.
As for the usability issues you mentioned to switch from live to vod, and back, that's kinda fair. I also don't think it's all that bad, but it is somewhat inconvenient. You don't need to type in '/videos' though as you seem to suggest, you can just click on the channel name, then the videos-tab is right there that contains all 'past broadcasts'.
What the platform does right is discoverability and user interaction. If I wanted to watch live gameplay of some game, and I went to YouTube, I wouldn't even know how to find streams of it at all. Also when following someone on twitch, I can be informed that he's going live (notification or even mail), wifi im pretty sure it's impossible on YouTube. User interaction is also just not there. I really wish other platforms were viable, cause competition eventually causes everyone to just do better, but nobody else seems to even tryn to take a share of their market...
It's as easy to find live games on YouTube as it is to find videos on Twitch. You type the game name and at the top click the "live" tab. If you subscribe to a user who goes live and you've enabled notifications (the bell) it alerts you when they go live. It's really simple.
I'm subscribed to quite a few channels. The problem with the notifications is that I can't distinguish between notifications for live streams or those for videos or Community posts. The only notifications I would care about are for live streams, as hose happen "now", I can watch videos why time. I don't wanna be spammed with all the notifications for normal videos, while I still want them in my notification bell menu on the site (so notifications need to be on for the channels).
YouTube can do videos and live streams, but it doesn't let me distinguish between these fundamentally different things in a meaningful way.
Yeah it’s pretty stupid, I only watch twitch these days using streamlink + mpv so I can replay whenever I want, but only since the point it started loading. Plus you get less delay than the web with the —twitch-low-latency option.