For sports fans that grew up before the 90s, you likely have fond memories of collecting baseball memorabilia or going to your first game. To hear eSports fans rattle off statistics and kill ratios from their favorite Twitch stream or boasting about their latest Fortnite Skin may bring back memories of spilling over your favorite team’s stats in the newspaper on Sundays or trading cards with your friends. Today’s eSports fans may engage a little differently than the traditional sporting fans of yonder, but they may be the most engaged fans in history – and they’re making their mark.
With over 2.2M creators streaming on Amazon’s popular video game streaming service, Twitch, every month, 517M watching gaming on YouTube, and another 185M consuming their video content on Twitch, eSports viewership has surpassed HBO, Netflix, ESPN & Hulu, combined. The massive online gaming viewership is changing the sporting landscape and technology requirements for fans, content providers, and ISPs alike.
To meet online gamers demand for faster & higher quality gaming experiences, Cox Cable recently launched a trial of their Elite Gamer package. The Elite Gamer package is a premium offer that they claim will result in “34% less lag, 55% fewer ping spikes, and 45% less jitter” by speeding up the connection between the player and the desired gaming server.
We believe this marks one of the first in what will be standard practices for ISPs and content providers. When you factor in the massive amount of content delivered and consumed via Twitch & YouTube into perspective, it’s no wonder that vendors are starting to consider how they will address the bandwidth & technology requirements that are needed to maintain the eGaming industry. For the casual gamer, they are required to have a download speed of at least 3 Mbps, an upload speed of at least 1 Mbps, and a ping rate under 150 ms and those figures multiply with each concurrent player in your household.
At Beamr, we live and breathe optimization. For us, the quality and bandwidth challenges introduced by the gaming industry are an opportunity to see how far we can push the limits of balancing video compression with the highest video quality possible.
If you are passionate about gaming and are curious about what it takes to deliver a high-quality cloud gaming experience, you will enjoy this episode from our podcast, The Video Insiders, where we interviewed Yuval Noimark from Electronic Arts. Listen to Episode 15 here.
Sources:
https://www.superdataresearch.com/market-data/gaming-video-content/
https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-for-online-gaming
