Thoughts on Twitch for Consoles

The Twitch Broadcast functionality went live earlier this month on the Xbox One and I’ve had a bit of play around with it. Developed by Twitch themselves, it includes much-wanted features like broadcast archiving and the picture quality is pretty good. The audio quality while using Kinect, however, is terrible.

The Xbox One’s Kinect does a great job of picking up speech and ignoring game sounds. However, that means that whenever you hit a cutscene, the dialogue gets streamed first from the game and then again through the Kinect microphone. Your voice will also come out sounding really tinny. You can hear examples of both in my highlight video below so do your viewers a favour and get a headset or headset adapter.

Watch live video from Weefz on TwitchTV

Beyond that, it’s really simple to use and the Snap component lets you monitor twelve lines of your channel’s chat through your screen. You can also close that for a full-screen picture and opt to show your living room with a picture-in-picture display or keep things private.

One problem I noticed is that it uses the Kinect Chat mic setting but doesn’t indicate this. Even when the microphone is shown as on within the Twitch app, if you’ve muted Use Kinect for Chat in the Xbox One settings, your viewers won’t be able to hear you.

As with most Twitch apps though, there still aren’t any mod tools. You’ll need a friend online or easy access to a computer if you run a strict mod policy. Moobot can help by keeping links, spam and keywords to a minimum.

The PS4’s Twitch app is serviceable but has so far been limited by low resolution pictures, lack of archiving and only being to watch other PS4 streams. On the PlayStation blog last week they announced that 720p streaming will finally be available, along with Twitch archiving. For the more serious streamer, HDCP will finally be switched off as well, so you’ll need less equipment to stream through your Mac and PC. There’s no definitive timeline for these updates but they should be coming within the next month or two.

Things are looking very good for Twitch. Has the integration into next-gen consoles made you get into streaming or watching others play games?