In August, Microsoft made a low-key blog post to announce that the company had acquired Beam. Haven’t heard of Beam? That’s okay. You’re going to hear a lot more about it since the service is coming to Xbox and Windows 10 later this year. Beam is a streaming service for social video game broadcasting like Twitch or YouTube Gaming. Beam’s twist is that it allows viewers to interact with the game being streamed.
Unless a critical mass of the steamers I watch actually move there, I don’t see myself taking the plunge. And I 100% refuse to watch video ads, so unless there’s a low-cost subscription that disables ads it’s a non-starter for me.
You’d rather pay money than watch the occasional ad? I get that they’re annoying don’t get me wrong. But it’s just the occasional 15 second blurb that’s over before it registers for me.
Anyway I’ll probably give this a go, but I don’t really get what kind of interaction viewers can have with the content?
Yes, because you’ll see that same 15 second ad 100 times a day, most of them are obnoxious, and I can’t fucking stand it when they block gameplay or informational sections of a stream/replay, nor do I like seeing them bookend every single stream I ever open while browsing and looking for something new. Those 15 seconds add right up to a big ‘fuck this shit’.
I get this sentiment. It’s why I don’t use Hulu anymore. When we were trying to binge a show it would drive me bonkers to see the same ad 20 times in a row.
Guess I don’t watch enough Hulu. As best I can tell, YouTube puts an ad up front on lots of videos and so does Twitch. I pretty much tune those out. Years of being married has made me pretty good at tuning stuff out.
I guess you can put me down as one of those people that can tune out the ads. And Hulu at least it getting a larger variety of ads it seems (also, it seems like none of the kids shows that I watch with my daughter have ads, which is great).
The event today revealed that the free Windows 10 “Creators Update” will include integrated Beam for Windows 10 gaming.
[quote]
On stage at the Windows event today, Microsoft’s Jenn McCoy showed how you can use commands on screen to provide suggestions to the person doing the streaming. McCoy also demoed how easy it is to start broadcasting for streamers, with a single button that automatically notifies your followers that you’ve begun a stream.[/quote]
This is more about broadcasting to your friends than actually making a living at it. There’s no infrastructure for payments, chat moderation, etc. Google is actually going after Twitch, Microsoft is just doing their own thing.
Hey, that actually sounds kind of fun. I’ve always only been a passive observer with Twitch because the idea of random whoevers watching me stream kind of creeps me out.
One of the flaws of Discourse is that by posting a snippet of text with every link, I’m forced to read part of the super enthusiastic and passionate blog posts about some hopeless tech novelty.
