Tue Feb 14, 2017 9:22 pm
I prefer Beam SO much more than twitch in so many ways. To be honest the only thing that Twitch has that I wish beam had is the clipping feature. There are a few other features like auto hosting but almost all these have been rolled out by twitch fairly recently and Beam basically does them all almost already, if there is a feature you need there is probably an app that you can integrate to work with Beam.
I prefer to stream because not only do I find the UI much easier, clearier to use, but if you are streaming from a PC it allows for you to edit almost all your information without having to leave you stream page or open a new tab. Everything from Account settings, to followers and friends, stream settings etc.
Now with it on Xbox again not only is it easier to use because it's built in there isn't another app you have to snap, but again it's much clearer and easier to set up. All the settings are in that one tab and then bam. You also now get a Chat Box that you can set to show up on your stream so you don't need to have your stream chat open somewhere from another source if you don't want.
Probably one of the best things though is the delay time. When I stream using the FTL the delay is less than a second, someones a second or two depending on my connection and who is viewing. On Xbox when it starts it was about a minute behind but after a refresh that went down too 20 seconds, and then soon enough it was back down to maybe a 2 second delay when Cruckeye and DuckE were watching me.
One of the main features though that I haven't actually set up or tried, that beam pushes is viewer interaction. Anytime you view a channel or stream you get "Sparks" which you can use to interact with streamers. When viewing through a webpage you can set up buttons/commands that do specific things such as play soundbits/soundboards or make graphics appear on screen or even follow commands in game (a bit like the TwitchPlays scenarios) which people use sparks to activate. Polls are also super easy to integrate into the chat a long with a bunch of other functions avaliable through apps.
To top it all of you can have a stream team straight from the bat. Where as with Twitch you need to get partnered (which in itself is a job) and then apply for a Stream Team, with Beam you can join and create teams from the get go. We already have a Halo Wheelmen team which a few of us are a part of.
Honestly beam is awesome. Now that it's integrated and the fact that it's backed by Microsoft I see the service skyrocketing. Even during the start up a lot of popular twitch streamers switched because they preferred the service, so now I think it's only a matter of time before you see more people switching.